The linguistics wars were a protracted academic dispute inside American

theoretical linguistics Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics which, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to theory of language, or the branch of linguistics which inquires into the ...

which took place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from an intellectual falling-out between

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...

and some of his early colleagues and doctoral students. The debate began in 1967, when linguists

Paul Postal Paul Martin Postal (born November 10, 1936 in Weehawken, New Jersey) is an American linguist. Biography Postal received his PhD from Yale University in 1963 and taught at MIT until 1965. That year, he moved to the City University of New York. I ...

, "Haj" Ross,

George Lakoff George Philip Lakoff (; born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. The con ...

, and James McCawley—self-dubbed the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (in reference to the

Book of Revelation The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament (and consequently the final book of the Christian Bible). Its title is derived from the first word of the Koine Greek text: , meaning "unveiling" or "revelation". The Book of ...

)—proposed an approach to the relationship between syntax and semantics which treated deep structures as meanings rather than syntactic objects. While

Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...

and other

generative grammar Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguisti ...

ians argued that the meaning of a sentence was derived from its syntax, the generative semanticists argued that syntax was derived from meaning. Eventually, generative semantics spawned an alternative linguistic paradigm, known as cognitive linguistics, which attempts to correlate the understanding of language with the concepts of

cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which ...

, such as memory, perception and categorization. While generative grammarians operate on the premise that the mind has a unique and independent module for

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...

, cognitive linguists deny this. Instead, they assert that the processing of linguistic phenomena is informed by conceptual deep structures and—more significantly—that the cognitive abilities used to process this data are similar to those used in other non-linguistic tasks.

Books

''The Linguistics Wars'' is the title of a 1993 book by Randy Allen Harris on the topic. A second edition was published in 2021.https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-linguistics-wars-9780199740338 It touches on the issues of the dispute involving Chomsky and other significant individuals ( Lakoff, Postal, etc.) and also highlights how certain theories evolved and which of their important features have influenced modern-day linguistic theories. ''Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates'' ( John A. Goldsmith and Geoffrey J. Huck, 1995) also explores that history, with detailed theoretical discussion and observed history of the times, including memoirs/interviews with

Ray Jackendoff Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always s ...

, Paul M. Postal, and

John R. Ross John Robert "Haj" Ross (born May 7, 1938) is an American poet and linguist. He played a part in the development of generative semantics (as opposed to interpretive semantics) along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal. He was a ...

. The ''What happened to Generative Semantics'' chapter explores the aftermath of the "wars" and the schools of thought or practice which could be seen as successors to generative semantics.

References

Generative linguistics Syntax Semantics Linguistic controversies Noam Chomsky {{Ling-stub

Books

See also

References