The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris

Author:Randy Allen Harris [Harris, Randy Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780199740338
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

For exactly the chance to fix bugs like these in his own linguistics, McCawley welcomed the alphabetic fecundity of the 1970s and 80s. “I regard the multiplicity of frameworks as highly desirable,” he said. “Any framework is going to lead its adherents to come up with facts that quite likely you wouldn’t come up with so easily in your own framework” (Cheng and Sybesma 1998:1).

The multiplicity of frameworks was remarkable, signaled most clearly by the vibrant 1979 Conference on Current Approaches to Syntax, sometimes just called The Milwaukee Conference but often referred to at the time as the Syntax Sweepstakes (Kac 1980, Moravcsik & Wirth 1980). GPSG and LFG apparently did not feel quite ready for prime time and went unrepresented. But DDG was there, and RG, and Montague Grammar (in point of fact, the presented model was labeled Montague Syntax), along with RRG, CORG, and EG, and a half dozen or so more.21 Nor was this the end of it. Yngve identified forty-two grammatical models by name in the mid-1980s, terminating the list with “among others” (Yngve 1986:108)—so, not quite McCawley’s thirty million. But a lot. The linguists plying these models largely appreciated one another’s work, cheerfully sharing axioms, borrowing innovations, and coöperating harmoniously. The only steadily visible resentment in the period was directed at Chomsky.

The rhetorical focus of this resentment was on what appeared to be growing inconsistencies in Chomsky’s work, especially in his adoption of positions he had previously denounced, and on Chomsky’s growing indifference to the technical machinery required by his own proposals. We enter a period in which “trashing Chomsky was the only reputable occupation for a self-respecting linguist” (Harpham 1999b:211). Michael Brame is a case in point. Not long removed from his (1976) EST attack-dog role against G. Lakoff and the Generative Semanticists, he railed not only about Chomsky’s stealthy adoption of many features from that program (a charge to which we will return), but about an even more egregious defect, Chomsky’s assumption of Generative Semantics’ nonchalant imprecision. He complained that the post-bellum Chomsky now regularly failed to formulate explicitly the rules sketchily evoked in his arguments. “Without explicit rules,” Brame says, targeting one particular claim, “it is difficult to envision what such an analysis would look like, and whether, in fact, it would even be formulable” (1978:210). Of another: “the formal account of the actual content of the words is taken to be a mere detail, a trait of Generative Semantics in its heyday” (1978:12). Of an entire subtheory:

As time now runs out on trace theory, one sees ever more far-fetched devices proposed to accommodate counterexamples that genuinely follow from more realistic approaches. Just as Generative Semanticists were inspired to propose global rules and other prophylactic devices to immunize their theory against refutation, so also trace theorists have begun to follow suit by adopting theoretical constructs which are seldom made explicit. (1978:13).

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