This book, which is written for nonspecialists, surveys nearly the entire history of European and North American linguistic thought, but focuses on the struggles between the practitioners of 'generative semantics' (GS) and 'interpretive semantics' (IS) within generative grammar from about 1967 to about 1972. H derives the title of the book from 'Postal's label for this period - "The Linguistic Wars"', which he acknowledges 'looks extreme to anyone outside the field, ... but WARS is the only fitting term. It was a vicious, aggressive, frequently ignominious period.' (152) Some of the original disputants have reacted in quite different ways to this book. Paul Postal and Frederick Newmeyer are quoted on the dust jacket as regarding it favorably, whereas Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff are said to 'disagree ... violently with [its] substance' (ix).
The book is organized as follows. Ch 1 (3-9) is a brief introduction to the problem of the study of the relation between language and thought, and introduces the chief cast of characters and the positions they occupy in the GS-IS controversy. Ch 2 (10-34) provides a lightning tour of the history of linguistics from the Stoics to the publication of Chomsky 1957, including mention of Varro, the scholastic and Renaissance grammarians, the comparativists and the neogrammarians, Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and the Bloomfieldians, including Zellig Harris. Chs 3 and 4 (35-100) trace the development of generative grammar from Chomsky 1957 to Chomsky 1965, i.e. the creation of the 'standard theory' (ST). Chs 5 and 6 describe the rise of GS, and the initial development of IS in the form of the 'extended standard theory' (EST) (101-59). The heart of the book is ch 7 (160-97), which analyzes the struggles between GS and IS practitioners. Ch 8 (198-213) recounts the style of much of the GS material. Ch 9 documents the 'collapse' of GS, and the further development IS in the form of the 'revised extended standard theory' (REST) (214-39). Finally, Ch 10 (240-60) deals with the aftermath of the controversy. Notes (261-310), Works cited (311-40) and an Index (341-56) complete the volume. [NOTE 1]
H's survey of Bloomfieldian linguistics in ch 2 effectively sets the stage for his description of Chomsky's arrival on the scene, including the Bloomfieldians' initial, generally favorable, reception of Chomsky 1957, and the controversies that arose shortly after its publication. 3.1-5 describe the innovations which that little book introduced, including the notion of a generative grammar that accounts for all and only all the sentences of a language, the conception of linguistic theory as providing an evaluation measure rather than a decision procedure for grammars, the inadequacy of both finite-state and phrase-structure (immediate constituent) grammars for the analysis of natural languages, the motivation for syntactic transformations, [NOTE 2] and raising the possibility that generative grammars, properly developed, provide a basis for semantic analysis. [NOTE 3]
H interrupts the flow of the narrative in 3.6 to describe the circumstances surrounding Chomsky's entry into linguistics. Sections 3.7-11 analyze Chomsky's triumph over the Bloomfieldians. According to H, 'the rout was all but complete by 1965' (81), and resulted from the extremely effective way in which Chomsky presented the idea that a grammar is a theory of knowledge of language (that is that linguistic theory is part of the theory of mind); [NOTE 4] championed Morris Halle's 1959 rejection of the phoneme; rehabilitated traditional grammarians and other intellectual forebears; and developed the concept of universal grammar.
The narrative is interrupted again in 4.1-2; 4.1 describing Chomsky's impact on other fields, and 4.2 assessing Chomsky's personality. [NOTE 5] Sections 4.3-4 trace the developments leading up to the publication of Chomsky 1965. My only quibble is H's failure to note the role played by Fillmore 1963 in the elimination of generalized transformations in favor of recursion in the base component. [NOTE 6] In sections 4.4-5, H summarizes the main points of the book itself, including the competence-performance distinction.
In 5.1, H observes: 'Everyone was happy with this work [Chomsky 1965], but no one was content' (102). Indeed, ST was stunningly short-lived as a motive force for doing linguistic research, having few adherents by 1970. [NOTE 7] The question is why.
H's answer is as follows. First (ch 5), several linguists, all initially at MIT or Harvard in various capacities, including George Lakoff, Robin Lakoff, James McCawley, Paul Postal, and John (Haj) Ross, determined that the interposition of the level of deep structure between semantic interpretation (meaning) and phonetic interpretation (sound) is unnecessary, and that a better theory is one which does away with that level, and which relates meaning to sound directly by means of an ordered series of transformations. This group won considerable following particularly outside of MIT. [NOTE 8] Second (ch 6), Chomsky reacted to these developments, not by defending ST, but by developing EST, a distinct theory of grammar embodying IS, in which not only deep structure, but also surface structure (the output of the transformational component and input to the phonological component) contributes to semantic interpretation. Chomsky's arguments were also quite persuasive, particularly among linguistics students at MIT. [NOTE 9]
While the first part of H's answer is essentially correct, the second is not. Chomsky did not develop EST as a response to the GS attack on ST, but rather because he was dissatisfied with ST for reasons of his own. [NOTE 10] The defense of ST against GS (and subsequently against EST) was carried out primarily by Katz (Katz 1970, 1971:363-452; Bever, Katz, and Langendoen 1976:1-9). Chomsky's attacks on GS were part of his general program begun in the late 1960s to attempt to restrict the class of grammars permitted by linguistic theory ultimately to finite size (Chomsky 1981:13), and to redefine linguistic theory as a theory of grammar (knowledge of language, or 'I-language') rather than as a theory of language ('E-language') itself (Chomsky 1986:19-36). [NOTE 11]
In chs 6-7, H analyzes a number of different aspects of the GS-IS controversy, including Chomsky's and McCawley's correspondence about the latter's attempt (McCawley 1968) to argue against positing a level of deep structure in a manner analogous to Halle's 1959 argument against positing a phonemic level; the confrontation between Postal and Chomsky at the 1969 Texas conference on the goals of linguistic theory (Chomsky 1972, Postal 1972); and the portrayal of the exchange between Chomsky and George Lakoff in the New York review of books in 1973. H does not discuss at all the less emotionally charged exchanges, such as that between George Lakoff and Barbara Partee (Partee 1970, 1971; Lakoff 1970).
In ch 9, H describes the collapse of GS as the result of the force of the various attacks on it, [NOTE 12] the failure of the movement to deliver on its promises in a timely fashion, and the success of Chomsky's alternative program of research, culminating in the development of REST. [NOTE 13] In ch 10, he describes what many of the major participants in the GS-IS controversy went on to do after the collapse of the GS movement. Nearly everyone in that movement left it, except McCawley, whose two-volume account of English syntax (McCawley 1988) deals systematically with problems he worked on throughout his career in GS. Postal developed 'arc pair grammar', a nontransformational multi-level theory of syntax based on a much richer theory of graphs than most linguists are used to (Johnson and Postal 1980). Ross pursued the study of squishes and other fuzzy phenomena in language (Ross 1975). Lakoff helped establish 'cognitive grammar' which denies a fundamental theoretical distinction between semantics and pragmatics (Lakoff and Thompson 1975; Langacker 1987, 1991). On the other hand, Chomsky moved steadily toward the 'Homogeneous II' theory of Postal 1972, culminating in Chomsky 1993, which combines the virtues of an undifferentiated transformational mechanism hedged about with global derivational constraints (e.g. 'procrastinate'), with a high degree of restrictiveness as to possible instantiation. [NOTE 14]
Akmajian, Adrian and Frank Heny. 1975. An introduction to the principles of transformational syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baker, Carl L. 1978. Introduction to generative-transformational syntax. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Berreby, David. 1994. Figures of speech: The rise and fall and rise of Chomsky's linguistics (Review of Randy Allen Harris, The linguistics wars). The sciences 34.1.44-9.
Bever, Thomas G. and Jerrold J. Katz. 1976. The fall and rise of empiricism. Bever, Katz and Langendoen 11-64.
Bever, Thomas G., Jerrold J. Katz, and D. Terence Langendoen, eds. 1976. An integrated theory of linguistic abilities. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.
Chomsky, Noam. 1955. The logical structure of linguistic theory. Mimeographed.
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Chomsky, Noam. 1962. A transformational approach to syntax. The third Texas conference on problems of linguistic analysis in English, ed. by Archibald A. Hill, 124-58. Austin: University of Texas Press. Reprinted in Fodor and Katz 1964:211-45.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam 1970a. Remarks on nominalization. Readings in English transformational grammar, ed. by Roderick A. Jacobs and Peter S. Rosenbaum, 184-221. Waltham, MA: Ginn.
Chomsky, Noam 1970b. Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation. Studies in oriental and general linguistics presented to Shiro Hattori on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, ed. by Roman Jakobson and Shigeo Kawamoto, 52-91. Tokyo: TEC Company.
Chomsky, Noam 1972. Some empirical issues in the theory of transformational grammar. Peters 63-130.
Chomsky, Noam. 1975. The logical structure of linguistic theory (Revised version of Chomsky 1955, ed. by Frank Heny). New York: Plenum.
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of language. New York: Praeger.
Chomsky, Noam. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. Hale and Keyser 1-52.
Covington, Michael A. 1994. Review of Hale and Keyser, eds., 1993. Language 70.802-7.
Fiengo, Robert W. 1974. Semantic conditions on surface structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT PhD dissertation.
Fillmore, Charles J. 1963. The position of embedding transformations in a grammar. Word 19.208-31.
Fodor, Jerry A. and Jerrold J. Katz, eds. 1964. The structure of language: Readings in the philosophy of language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Hale, Kenneth L. and S. Jay Keyser, eds. 1993. The view from Building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Halle, Morris. 1959. The sound pattern of Russian. The Hague: Mouton.
Harris, Randy Allen. 1994. Letter to the editor (Reply to Berreby 1994). The sciences 34.3.5-6.
Johnson, David E. and Paul M. Postal. 1980. Arc pair grammar. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Katz, Jerrold J. 1970. Interpretive semantics vs. generative semantics. Foundations of language 6.220-59.
Katz, Jerrold J. 1971. Semantic theory. New York: Harper and Row.
Lakoff, George. 1970. Repartee, or a reply to Negation, conjunction and quantifiers. Foundations of language 6.389-422.
Lakoff, George and Henry Thompson. 1975. Introduction to cognitive grammar. Berkeley linguistic society 1.295-313.
Langacker, Ronald. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar I: Theoretical perspectives. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Langacker, Ronald. 1991. Foundations of cognitive grammar II: Descriptive application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Lees, Robert B. 1960. The grammar of English nominalizations. The Hague: Mouton.
McCawley, James D. 1968. The role of semantics in a grammar. Universals in linguistic theory, ed. by Emmon Bach and Robert T. Harms, 125-70. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
McCawley, James D. 1988. The syntactic phenomena of English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Partee, Barbara H. 1970. Negation, conjunction and quantifiers: Syntax vs. semantics. Foundations of language 6.153-65.
Partee, Barbara H. 1971. On the requirement that transformations preserve meaning. Studies in linguistic semantics, ed. by Charles J. Fillmore and D. Terence Langendoen, 1-21. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Peters, P. Stanley, ed. 1972. Goals of linguistic theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Postal, Paul M. 1972. The best theory. Peters 131-70.
Ross, John R. 1975. Clausematiness. Formal semantics of natural language, ed. by Edward L. Keenan, 422-75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1. Each chapter is introduced with two epigraphs and each section with one. Some of these are wonderfully apt. Uncharacteristically for books on linguistics, the sections are named, but unnumbered. I refer to them, however, as if they were numbered; e.g. 3.5 refers to the fifth section of chapter 3.
2. There are a couple of typos in the examples in 3.4-5. Example 10b (44) should read '*The farmer was bitten by the sandwich'. In rule 16b (50), the second occurrence of 'the' should be deleted, and 'of' should be italicized.
3. H does point out the work that had begun on semantic analysis among Bloomfieldian linguists, citing papers by Eugene Nida, Dwight Bolinger, Martin Joos, and Floyd Lounsbury (on componential analysis). However, I am puzzled by his downplaying of the significance of Harris' transformational analysis for semantic analysis compared to that of Chomsky's early theory (49). The two theories have essentially the same significance for semantics.
4. H avoids the tricky question of the origins of Chomsky's mentalism: 'It probably makes some difference to Chomsky's biography, especially for the repeated charges that he plays fast and loose in accounts of his own intellectual development, but it is irrelevant for our purposes whether Chomsky started off as anti-mentalist, mentalist, or agnostic' (269 n14).
5. H clearly considers Chomsky a heroic figure, at one point calling him 'a hero of Homeric proportions' (54). In writing about Chomsky, H ranges from worshipful: 'Lo, in the east, Chomsky arose' (30) to contemptuous: 'In support of these ... moves, Chomsky's arguments are vague, half-baked, and ad hoc.' (141) Elsewhere, H comments on his treatment of Chomsky in this book: 'My book treats linguistics as a human enterprise, like any other science, and Chomsky as a human being.' (1994:6)
6. Interestingly, base recursion is also used in Chomsky 1962 without comment.
7. However, ST persisted in popular textbooks on syntax well into the 1970s, for example Akmajian and Heny 1975, which presents ST only; and Baker 1978, which does not introduce EST and GS until ch 15.
8. H notes that other linguists were also offering modifications to ST, including Jeffrey Gruber and Charles Fillmore (146).
9. H also describes the contributions toward the development of EST that some of Chomsky's students, particularly Ray Jackendoff, made during this period.
10. H declares that 'everyone immediately perceived [Chomsky's 1967 class lectures on nominalizations] as an attack on generative semantics.... Chomsky, though - here the story gets particularly bizarre - says he wasn't much interested in generative semantics ... at the time.... His ... lectures, he says, were just a delayed reaction to [Lees 1960].' (139) But the story is only bizarre if one is inclined to disbelieve Chomsky's account. H does, however, point out that Chomsky was never fully convinced of the Katz-Postal principle that transformations are meaning preserving, despite his endorsement of that notion in Chomsky 1965:162. H quotes Jackendoff quoting Chomsky on one of his visits to MIT during the second semester of his 1966-67 sabbatical leave: 'Of course surface structure plays a role in interpretation.' (146) H also observes that it was Katz, not Chomsky, who referred to the principle as the Chomsky-Katz-Postal principle (154).
11. H separates the arguments in Chomsky 1970a,b for the lexicalist hypothesis, X-bar theory, and the contribution of surface structure to semantic interpretation, from the arguments in Chomsky 1972 about the need for restrictiveness and specificity (which H refers to as 'complexity') in linguistic theory. In fact, these arguments are all of a piece, the first group of arguments being directed toward the development of a theory of grammar that meets the general requirements laid out in the second group. H does not discuss Chomsky's efforts to limit the class of grammars defined by linguistic theory to finite size, nor his contention that linguistic theory is not responsible for the characterization of E-languages.
12. Later, Bever and Katz 1976 argued that GS opens the way for the return of an empiricist theory of language. This idea is an extension of Chomsky's contention that GS is less specific than IS in the articulation of linguistic theory: the less specific one's theory of grammar, the more likely it is that one would accept general learning mechanisms as an explanation for the acquisition of language.
13. In his otherwise excellent summary of the development of REST in ch 9, H fails to note the important contribution of Fiengo 1974.
14. The similarity between Chomsky's later theories and GS has been repeatedly noted (Covington 1994; see 308 n19 for additional references). H suggests that Chomsky's refusal to acknowledge the influence of GS in his work reveals that he has an attitude problem: 'The interesting issue is that he denounced generative semantics so warmly for many of the tendencies and mechanisms he now embraces equally warmly, a denunciation ... he still maintains.' (254)