The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure [Paperback]

The Linguistics Warstells 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.An updated and expanded history of the field of linguistics from the 1950s to the current dayThe Linguistics Warstells 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.Chapter One: Language, Thought, and the Linguistics WarsChapter Two: The Beauty of Deep StructureChapter Three: Generative Semantics 1: The ModelChapter Four: Generative Semantics 2: The HeresyChapter Five: The Vicissitudes of WarChapter Six: Generative Semantics 3: The EthosChapter Seven: Generative Semantics 4: The CollapseChapter Eight: Twentieth Century Linguistics l“n