LINGUIST List 33.3261
Wed Oct 26 2022
Review: History of Linguistics: Harris (2021)
Editor for this issue: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon <luceroguillenlinguistlist.org>
Date: 06-Aug-2022
From: Andy Rogers <andyrogers
aol.com>
Subject: The Linguistics Wars
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AUTHOR: Randy Allen Harris
TITLE: The Linguistics Wars
SUBTITLE: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2021
REVIEWER: Andy Rogers,
SUMMARY
Oxford University Press has published a second edition of Randy Allen Harris’s “The Linguistics Wars.” The second edition, like the first, covers, the conflict between two research frameworks in generative grammar, from the early nineteen-sixties to the late seventies, which he labels Chomskyan and Lakovian to encapsulate their evolution over time, from the Aspects model versus abstract syntax at the beginning, later to Interpretive Semantics versus Generative Semantics, and ultimately to Biolinguistics and Cognitive Linguistics. The second edition omits the pre-generative history of the first edition to make room for later developments, primarily among the protagonists, after the conflict dissipated.
Harris’s book joins other accounts of the conflict, including the first edition of Newmeyer’s (1980) “Linguistic Theory in America,” Robin Lakoff’s (1984) “The Way We Were,” the (1993) first edition of Harris’s book, the (1986) second edition of Newmeyer’s book, and Huck and Goldsmith’s (1995) “Ideology and Linguistic Theory.”
The first two chapters are basically scene-setting, introducing the context of the conflict and its major players. Chapters Three through Seven detail the basis and progress (if that is the right word) of the conflict, with Chapters Eight and Nine summarizing its effects on twentieth and twenty-first century linguistics. The final chapter is given over to Chomsky and his peripatetic theorizing from his (1951) master's thesis to (Berwick and Chomsky 2011, 2016) Biolinguistics, each development purportedly a major innovation, yet somehow a logical development of everything that came before.
Harris says, in the preface to the first edition, which he includes in the second, that the book is aimed at a popular audience interested in “what linguists do, why they do it, and why everyone should care about what they do.” I don't really think that's what this book portrays (and I shudder to think that it might). This is really a book about an academic war of succession and its aftermath, told from an informed outside position. Harris also hopes that linguists may find the book useful, informative and even-handed. I suspect that linguists are more likely to swim through over 400 pages plus notes than the educated layman, but I could be wrong.
EVALUATION
Noam Chomsky's (1965) “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax” opened a Pandora's box (actually a large jar; a ‘pithos’ in Greek, mistranslated by the 16th-century humanist Erasmus) of semantics and he spent the next fifteen years trying to close it back. The pro-Pandoran were delighted for semantics to see the light of day and proceeded to use it in various ways, arguing that the old pre-Pandoran ways were arbitrary and inadequate. Chomsky responded that he really had not been in favor of opening the jar, but was talked into it. For a while, the Lakovians seemed to carry the day, but Chomsky and his supporters managed, after 15 years, to put most of the lid back on their part of the jar, if not the Pandoran part. In the meantime, other jars showed up, spilling their contents as well. That’s the story Harris captures. I happen to have been acquainted with nearly all of the protagonists and their work during the conflict, so I had a near front-row seat as the story unwound. The Pandorans were spearheaded by George Lakoff, along with Paul Postal, Haj Ross, Jim McCawley, and Robin Tolmach Lakoff, among others. Ray Jackendoff was Chomsky's able assistant.
A great deal of ink was spilled, scores of straw men were eviscerated, and aspersions were cast right and left over the role of semantics in linguistic analysis. Volleys were answered by cannonades, the high ground was captured and lost, insults were hurled, positions quietly reversed, jobs won and lost, as were publications and small departments. All this activity educes the saying, variously attributed to Woodrow Wilson, Henry Kissinger, Wallace Sayre, (and probably Big Bird), ''Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.''
Harris is not a linguist; his degree is in technical writing, but he demonstrates a deep knowledge of the issues in the conflict; he also brings a needed sense of perspective to the story. His stunning bibliography runs a monograph-length 65 pages, with over 1600 entries, and he appears to have absorbed it all; he probably even knows what Kelly Hunt’s T-units (Hunt 1965) are.
Harris has the exacting job of capturing for the general reader the ins and outs of an abstruse academic dispute in an esoteric subject in a way that reveals the personalities of those involved. That he succeeds to the considerable extent that he does is testimonial to both his perseverant scholarship and his sense of perspective. Easing his reader into this academic tangle requires a great deal of scene-setting, which consumes the first two chapters. Harris does an excellent job of moving the story along by describing events and papers in an as-they-happened style, and filling in the background as necessary. The continuity of the narrative suffers from the interruptions, but, given the complexity of the issues involved, they are necessary. Harris zooms in on the significant details of a particular argument or example and zooms back out to place it in context, demonstrating both mastery of the material and a firm grip on his narrative. Harris simplifies where necessary but rarely missteps. He occasionally offers evaluative remarks, but for the most part, he allows the reader to reach their own conclusions.
From the beginning of the George Lakoff-Noam Chomsky conflict to the George and Haj show to Chomsky's churlishness at the Texas Goals conference to the Lakoff-Jackendoff profane exchange at the 1969 LSA meeting, to Chomsky's counterattacks, to his ignoring Generative Semantics, to Haj Ross and George Lakoff's non-discreteness, to Generative Semantics' embrace of not only semantics, but, led by George Lakoff, pragmatics, metaphor, and embodied meaning, the story moves at a remarkable clip for such a large arcane beast. Harris is to be congratulated for the book's completeness and accuracy.
Not everyone in this fight was an angel, as becomes clear in Harris's telling. Chomsky will not like the book, for good reason, as it shows a side of him which he probably prefers not to be seen. Nor will George Lakoff, because it is critical of some of his work, if not his ethics. If either of them did like the book, it would be a failure.
Harris has a firm grip on the personalities of the protagonists, based on what they have said and done, and he has captured them to a T, or at least an S. A prime example is his rendition of the events of the 1969 Goals of Linguistic Theory Conference held at the University of Texas at Austin. As it happens, I attended the conference as a graduate student. It was held in the Student Union, which has several large adjoining ballrooms connected by opening large folding doors. Word of mouth billed the conference as the Texas Shootout: Chomsky versus Generative Semantics. Paul Postal, one of the Generative Semantics leaders, and Chomsky both gave papers; Postal's (1972), ''The Best Theory'', came first. From the title, and knowing Postal's style, I assumed that the paper would be a satire of Chomsky's current theory, although I quickly realized that Postal meant that the best theory was intended to refer to the version of Generative Semantics that Postal advocated, as opposed to Chomsky's more complex post-Aspects model. After Postal's talk, there were questions from the floor, with the questioner going to one of two microphones set up in front of the audience.
For Chomsky's talk (1972a), ''Some Empirical Issues in the Theory of Transformational Grammar,'' the room had to be enlarged to accommodate the crowd. I was introduced to linguistics by Chomsky's (1957) “Syntactic Structures,” Lees's (1963) “The Grammar of English Nominalizations,” which Chomsky had supervised as a dissertation, and Chomsky's (1965) “Aspects of the theory of Syntax,” so I was thrilled at the opportunity to hear him speak. Chomsky's talk was basically a response to a number of proposals by generative semanticists directed at Chomskyan positions.
At the conclusion of Chomsky's talk, the floor was opened for questions, and Haj Ross—a leading Generative Semanticist whose internationally-recognized (1967) dissertation Chomsky had recently supervised, who was then a junior MIT linguistics department colleague of Chomsky's, and who, according to Ross (Huck and Goldsmith, 1995:125) sat next to Chomsky on the plane down to Austin for the conference—started to ask a question. About four words into his question, Chomsky interrupted Ross and continued speaking over him. When it became clear that Chomsky was not going to allow Ross to finish his question, much less answer it, Ross walked away from the microphone and left the room. In the much later Ross interview in Huck and Goldsmith, Ross says (also p. 125), ''I remember I talked to him [Chomsky] about it afterwards. I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was something like, 'I just couldn't take it. Here these people were saying wrong things.' I don't remember him saying he was sorry, exactly, he was just trying to explain why he had to do what he did.'' I gather from Harris's book that Chomsky has a very egocentric definition of ''wrong.''
The incident with Ross was the point at which it became indelibly clear to me that Chomsky was far more interested in winning arguments than in exploring the issues at hand. Harris's book makes clear that Chomsky's behavior toward Ross at the 1969 Texas conference was not an isolated incident. The book, while tracing the ins and outs of the linguistics wars, also describes a number of instances of Chomsky's appalling behavior; see, for example, pages 35-37, 129-130, 138-139, 150-154, 195-196, 227-229, and 390-409.
Not that Chomsky was opposed by a choir of angels. Paul Postal, in Huck and Goldsmith (p. 133) says that around 1966, when George Lakoff was at Harvard and Haj Ross was at MIT, the two of them would go to Chomsky's class and hassle him, propose competing analyses to the problems Chomsky was discussing, and offer counterexamples to his analyses. My understanding is that things could get rowdy. Given their relative positions, this required at least phenomenal chutzpah (which George has never been accused of being short of). George Lakoff likes to be the center of attention, to talk, and to argue, and he was in a hurry to make a name for himself. Postal also intimates in Huck and Goldsmith (pp. 131-132) that Chomsky and Lakoff rubbed each other the wrong way because their personalities are so similar, and not in a good way; think Godzilla versus Megalon. Both have reputations for being thin-skinned and demanding loyalty, and they are never wrong. Lakoff (1963, 1965, 1970, 1971a, 1973, 1974, Lakoff and Ross 1967) attacked Chomsky's proposals, and Chomsky, under attack, quintupled down and returned fire (1970a, 1970b, 1972a, 1973), generally employing a mild tone, destroying straw men right and left, and often employing what Harris calls ad personam negative comments about the work of his opponents. Chomsky's debating style has had a corrosive influence on syntactic argumentation in linguistics.
George Lakoff's proposals in that period tended toward the sketchy and grandiose, which Harris points out. George is unusually optimistic, particularly when it comes to his own proposals, not that Chomsky is a retiring damsel. I think that even George would admit in his quiet moments that he can be quite combative when he wants to be, and with Chomsky, he often did, a fact which Harris captures, perhaps insufficiently. That said, Lakoff is also an engaging teacher who encourages his students to develop their own research ideas early in their preparation, openly sharing with them whatever he is working on. Chomsky has a reputation for being helpful to students, accessible, if overbooked, but sometimes brutally argumentative in the classroom, as Harris points out. Harris also accurately reflects Chomsky's disposition to aim his fire in Lakoff's direction.
Ross (1967, 1969a, 1969b, 1970a, 1970b, 1972, 1973) was on firmer ground than Lakoff, since he had been a student of Chomsky's, and is endearing and totally unabrasive. Harris's characterizations of Ross and McCawley (1968a, 1968b, 1973, 1976, 1998), both brilliant in different ways, are striking: Ross, the earnest entertaining overdoer, and McCawley, the meticulous, sweet-tempered, provocateur. Jackendoff (1972, 1977), who developed and largely implemented the changes which Chomsky outlined in the early stages of the conflict, is a little sketchily presented, but basically true to the mark. Harris's characterization of Postal (1970, 1971, 1972, 1974) as polemicist and careful analyst captures two sides of his personality, which vary in emphasis over his career. Harris's characterization of Robin Lakoff (1968, 1969, 1975, 1989), as a pioneer of abstract syntax, a quiet incisive Generative Semantics partisan, and founder of feminist linguistics seems about right too. Katz, I have no firsthand knowledge of beyond reading his early work on what turns out to be a very limited, but important at the time, notion of semantics.
There are a few dissonances; one of the oddest is in Chapter 9, ''The Aftermath: Twenty-First Century Linguistics,'' which, after a brief introduction proceeds to discuss Jim McCawley's contribution; McCawley died in 1999, which, the last time I checked, was not in the twenty-first century. Also, to those of us who were there, it is the ''Katz-Postal Hypothesis,'' not the ''Katz-Postal Principle,'' regardless of what Harris and Google say.
Given how thoroughly Harris documents his sources, there are a couple of puzzling omissions. On page x of the Preface to the second edition, Harris mentions that both Chomsky and George Lakoff “have published a few accounts of the Deep Structure battles and their fallout” but, inexplicably, there are no citations. By email, Harris offered Chomsky interviews, Barsky 1997a:56-57, Grewendorf 1994, and Hughes 2006:88 to add to examples he cites elsewhere in the book, such as Chomsky 1979. Harris also offers George Lakoff interviews: Huck and Goldsmith 1995:107-119, de Mendoza Ibañez 1997 and Brockman 1999, as well as Lakoff's discussion in George Lakoff 1987:582-585.
On page 133, Harris refers to ''Postal's label for this period—'The Linguistic Wars''', but offers no citation. When asked about it by email, Harris responded that he got the expression from Newmeyer's book (1980, 1986), and indeed, Newmeyer's Chapter 5, on the conflict is called ''The Linguistic Wars,'' and the term is attributed to Postal; Newmeyer does not offer a citation either, but by email he says it came from one of Postal's unpublished but fairly-widely circulated Linguistic Anarchy Notes from the late 1960s, ''Another Casualty of the Linguistic Wars.'' ''Linguistic'' became ''Linguistics'' as the title of Harris's book because someone at Oxford University Press insisted on adding the “s” to make it clear that Harris's book was about linguistics, not language per se.
Here and there, there are instances in the body of the text where a reference is given to a publication year without the corresponding letter when there are multiple publications by that author that year; sometimes you can figure out which one was intended, sometimes not. There are also a few places in the text which cite items which do not seem to appear in the bibliography at all. Given the mass of the bibliography, Harris can legitimately plead bibliographic exhaustion.
There is also an odd printing glitch, in which a letter which contains a straight vertical line, like an ''m'', “b”, “d”, ''r'', or ''f'' extends well below its line. See the fifth line from the bottom of page 57, another on the second line of the next to last paragraph of page 133, and others on at least pages 253, 289, 337, 361, 385, and 413. I, and I'm sure Harris, expected better of Oxford Press.
These are but quibbles about a highly accessible and thorough account of an academic conflict which seemed important at the time, but in retrospect seems rather less so.
Harris has also supplied by email a correction to the first and second printings of the book, which is to go into the third and subsequent printings. On page 416, paragraph 4, the text should be corrected as follows:
''In the early 1950s, a shatteringly precocious young Chomsky did begin a research program anchored to the insight that ‘grammar will in general contain a recursive specification of a denumerable set of sentences’ (Chomsky 1979 [1951]:67n2), an insight that has driven the field of linguistics pretty much ever since. It’s been a bumpy ride. Several variations on that theme grew mutually antagonistic, most dramatically with the Generative Semantics Heresy, and all of them were foundationally antagonistic to various other approaches. But Chomsky, the presence, has towered over the field for the better part of a century since he first wielded his recursion insight, and—''
Harris is right, when he says on page 260, ''The Generative/Interpretive Semantics feud was not an honorable episode in the history of linguistics.'' and shows us why. We see that Chomsky is brilliant, accessible, helpful to students, and ruthless in argumentation, that he has apparently been obsessively argumentative since at least late adolescence, and that his view of whatever he is arguing about is not necessarily to be trusted. There seems to be a strange logic involved here; truth is to be arrived at by argumentation, so if you win the argument, your view is truth. We see that George Lakoff is also brilliant, argumentative and equally certain that he is right, which naturally led to conflict with Chomsky. Imagine, if you will, that Phil Donahue instead of George Lakoff pointed out to Chomsky the problems with the Aspects model; different story entirely. We discover the character of the protagonists through their actions.
Was the conflict worth it? Well, Generative Semantics pointed out significant problems in the Aspects model and proposed solutions, many of which were eventually widely accepted after initially being condemned as vague and wrongheaded, usually without acknowledgment of either the source or the reversal. But Generative Semantics and successors had problems of its own, tending to spread its data net much wider that its substantive analyses. The Chomskyan successors to Aspects, starting with lexicalism (1970a), have not obviously moved the ball forward, Chomskyan declarations notwithstanding, but seem, at times, to lurch from one odd compulsion to another without making obvious substantive progress.
So where do we stand 56 years later? If nothing else, Harris's story should serve as an object lesson; this is NOT the way to do linguistics (or any other academic subject). Is linguistics itself better off from having been through these battles? It is not obvious that it is. Generative Grammar promised to provide us with useful tools for the analysis of syntax, but the promises have vastly exceeded the deliverables. On the other hand, it was the promises which led, in part, to the explosive growth in the number of people doing linguistics since the fifties, the (in Chuck Fillmore's (1972) incredibly apt phrase) Ordinary Working Grammarian.
The OWG, fortunately, was relatively unaffected by the wars; as a result, there has been an enormous increase in the information we have about individual languages. But in terms of Language, with a capital L, we seem, at best, to be wandering. Partisans on all sides will point to their current work and say, ''But look at the wonderful things we're doing now!'', but they would have said that at any time in the past and will say it at any time in the future, all to be taken with truckloads of salt. Today's theory will be abandoned for tomorrow's ''revolution''; that's academic marketing. Maybe we need to soft-pedal theorizing until we have enough substantive information about a wide enough variety of languages to theorize ABOUT. Imagine what chemistry would be like if all our theorizing was based on just the study of helium. It is not at all clear that over fifty years of theoretical wrangling has produced anything but hot air and rancor.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Andy Rogers received his PhD from UCLA under Barbara Partee, writing on the lexical semantics of physical perception verbs in English. He taught at The University of Texas at Austin, where he organized a conference on presupposition and speech acts, the proceedings of which were published by the Center for Applied Linguistics. He is now retired and living in Austin, Texas, where he ponders metalinguistic negation.
Page Updated: 26-Oct-2022