Review of
Randy Allen Harris: The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure. Second edition. Oxford University Press. 2021.
John Goldmith
University of Chicago
Randy Harris has written an extremely engaging account of the rise of generative syntax and of some of the linguists who participated in this development, focusing on the scruffy fights that held a lot of people’s attention in the second half of the 1960s, and then tracking the trajectories of the linguists after that very belligerent moment. The book is great fun to read—Randy is a terrific writer, the likes of which we rarely see among academics—and along the way, the reader learns a lot of linguistics. (We’ll come back to that last point, though, because there are some points, not all of them fine points, which deserve some discussion.) This book is a greatly revised second edition of a book that came out in the early 1990s, and this new edition is longer and covers much more territory. While it is as punchy and pugnacious as the first, it is also more thoughtful and considered. Randy’s academic specialization is rhetoric, so you’ll learn a lot about rhetoric, and rhetoric has a lot to do with this story, which starts off as the story about the first rupture inside the group of young Turks known as generative grammarians back in the mid 1960s, pitting Chomsky and a few of his students, like Ray Jackendoff, against the four horsemen of the Generative Semanticists (Haj Ross, Jim McCawley, Paul Postal, and George Lakoff). Without conflict, there’s no story to tell, so conflict is at the center of the book, but it’s not an evenly matched conflict: it’s CHOMSKY in upper case letters against the others, whose names are in lower case and not set out in neon lights the way a certain other linguist’s are.
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History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 