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The Linguistics Wars tells the tumultuous history of language and cognition studies from the rise of Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar to the current day. Focusing on the rupture that split the field between Chomsky's structuralist vision and George Lakoff's meaning-driven theories, Randy Allen Harris portrays the extraordinary personalities that were central to the dispute and its aftermath, alongside the data, technical developments, and social currents that fueled the unfolding and expanding schism.
List of contents
- Chapter One: Language, Thought, and the Linguistics Wars
- Chapter Two: The Beauty of Deep Structure
- Chapter Three: Generative Semantics 1: The Model
- Chapter Four: Generative Semantics 2: The Heresy
- Chapter Five: The Vicissitudes of War
- Chapter Six: Generative Semantics 3: The Ethos
- Chapter Seven: Generative Semantics 4: The Collapse
- Chapter Eight: Twentieth Century Linguistics at Closing Time
- Chapter Nine: The Aftermath: 21st Century Linguistics
- Chapter Ten: Chomsky Agonistes
- Glossary
- Works Cited
About the author
Randy Allen Harris is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. His books include Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the New Conversational Interfaces, Rhetoric and Incommensurability, two volumes in the Routledge Landmark Essays series, both in aspects of Rhetoric of Science; and The Linguistics Wars.
Summary
An updated and expanded history of the field of linguistics from the 1950s to the current day
The Linguistics Wars tells the tumultuous history of language and cognition studies from the rise of Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar to the current day. Focusing on the rupture that split the field between Chomsky's structuralist vision and George Lakoff's meaning-driven theories, Randy Allen Harris portrays the extraordinary personalities that were central to the dispute and its aftermath, alongside the data, technical developments, and social currents that fueled the unfolding and expanding schism. This new edition, updated to cover the more than twenty-five years since its original publication and to trace the impact of that schism on the shape of linguistics in the twenty-first century, is essential reading for all those interested in the study of language, the making of knowledge, and some of the most brilliant minds of our era.
Additional text
This book provides an interesting example of recent history and is an important milestone in Chomsky historiography.
