33.3742, Author Reply to Review of “The Linguistics Wars” 33.3261

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3742. Wed Dec 07 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3742, Author Reply to Review of “The Linguistics Wars” 33.3261

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar, Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Lauren Perkins
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Joshua Sims, Jeremy Coburn, Daniel Swanson, Matthew Fort, Maria Lucero Guillen Puon, Billy Dickson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon <luceroguillen at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: 
From: Lucero Guillen [luceroguillen at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Author Reply to Review of “The Linguistics Wars” 33.3261


Harris reply to Rogers review at
https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.3261/

LINGUIST list (LL) and “The Linguistics Wars” both came on the scene
in the early 1990s as the Internet was slouching toward the World Wide
Web but before it had yet got there. It was a fortuitous convergence.
John Lawler reviewed the book in LINGUIST 4.644, quickly sparking some
really interesting and occasionally contentious discussions (in issues
4.644, 4.649, 4.654, 4.658, 4.671, 4.722) of a sort that were unknown
before LL brought linguistics 'online;' before that, exchanges were
either transient (conferences) or glacial (journals).

So I was delighted not only that LL decided to review the new edition,
but also that Andy Rogers, someone who was in the thick of the events
it chronicles, was the reviewer. He does a good job of representing
the content of the book, and says some very kind things about its
scholarship and fluidity, but I do have a few comments I'd like to
add. If others want to weigh in, or Rogers has a reply, so much the
better.

To start, I'd just like to thank Rogers for the review, in part
because it was generous and quite reflective of the book, but in
larger part because it helped bring into sharper focus a few things
about the conflict I chart. I have talked and corresponded with a lot
of linguists who were active during the years at the heart of my book,
extensively before the first edition and periodically since—not always
at my own initiative. “The Linguistics Wars” struck a chord with that
generation. Linguists often come up to me at conferences wanting to
share their War stories, or they just spontaneously email me after
reading the book (something many others have done, as well, sans the
eye-witness accounts and personal grievances). But Rogers's review
still kindled fresh insight.

Most notably for me, the simple chronology he gives of the notorious
1969 "Texas Shootout" was very suggestive. That was the conference at
which one gunslinger, Noam Chomsky, delivered the catalogue of
misconceptions and obscurities he diagnosed of early Generative
Semantics (1972/1969), later published under the innocuous title of
"Some Empirical Issues in the Theory of Transformational Grammar," and
at which another gunslinger, Paul Postal, outlined his imperiously
christened "Best Theory" (1972/1969). One wore a black hat. One wore a
white one. But which one was which?

That conference (on the Goals of Linguistic Theory; see Peters 1972)
was perhaps the crucial  turning point in a bifurcating movement away
from the Standard Theory codified in Chomsky (1965), setting off a
decade of animosity and bitterness that still lingers in some quarters
(detectable at points, I think, in Rogers's review). But it wasn't the
two big position papers, by Chomsky and by Postal, that marked the
turning point so much as one particular episode on the final day.
Everyone, without exception, isolates that episode as the harbinger,
if not the cause, of all the hostility to come. It was an exercise of
nearly inexplicable contemptuousness by Chomsky that cast the die. He
refused to even allow Haj Ross to ask a question from the floor by
talking over him relentlessly, until Ross finally gave up and walked
away.

What is so remarkable about the episode is that Chomsky was not just
at the absolute zenith of linguistics at the time, while Ross was a
bottom-feeding junior professor only two years post dissertation, but
that Ross was also very well known to Chomsky and universally well
liked for his gentleness and geniality; more than that, he had been
recently hired into Chomsky's own department at M.I.T. They had even
flown down to the conference together, seat mates. Most remarkably of
all, Ross had been Chomsky's student and they had worked together on a
highly creative line of research that would soon become among the most
influential set of proposals in formal syntax, the Island Constraints.
Chomsky's behaviour violated every norm and duty of a supervisor, who
is expected to foster and support the careers of their students.

So Ross, along with George Lakoff and others, had published arguments
which pushed (without hostility) against some positions in Chomsky's
recent crown jewel, the framework-defining “Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax”, and Ross would likely have pursued those arguments had he
been allowed to speak. One would, in any case, expect his supervisor
to listen respectfully, compliment the acuity of his student, maybe
even cite his relevant contributions for the record, and kindly
disagree with whatever he found unpalatable. Not so. Chomsky couldn't
even tolerate a few syllables from him.

Chomsky's conduct was seen as an act of unparalleled viciousness by
Lakoff and Postal in particular, who described them to me, but not
only them—though Ross himself seemed to recall it more as baffling
discourtesy than as enmity. He recounted the incident to me sadly and
regretfully, almost as if he was somehow responsible for what he
called the "bad vibes."

But Rogers's telling of it brings something out that had somehow
escaped me previously:

I attended the conference as a graduate student. It was held in the
Student Union, which has several large adjoining ballrooms connected
by opening large folding doors. Word of mouth billed the conference as
the Texas Shootout: Chomsky versus Generative Semantics. Paul Postal,
one of the Generative Semantics leaders, and Chomsky both gave papers;
Postal's (1972), ''The Best Theory'', came first. …

When it became clear that Chomsky was not going to allow Ross to
finish his question, much less answer it, Ross walked away from the
microphone and left the room. In the much later Ross interview in Huck
and Goldsmith, Ross says [1995, 125] ''I remember I talked to him
[Chomsky] about it afterwards. I can't remember exactly what he said,
but it was something like, 'I just couldn't take it. Here these people
were saying wrong things.' I don't remember him saying he was sorry,
exactly, he was just trying to explain why he had to do what he did.''
(LINGUIST List 33.3261)

I termed Chomsky's public humiliation of his student "nearly
inexplicable" above, but Rogers's account provides some inklings of an
explanation; that is, of an explanation that can take us beyond
variations of the "Chomsky's a pr*ck" reasons I have been offered more
than once.

Now, psychobiography is far from an exact science. But when enough
factors converge it is not unreasonable to speculate about motives and
impulses, and Rogers's outlining of the chronology, coupled with the
broadly gesturing quasi-apology, strongly suggests that Chomsky
attacked Ross as a proxy for Postal and probably for Lakoff. The fact
that Ross never actually said anything, and that Postal’s paper had
preceded Chomsky’s, and that Chomsky's later rationalization to Ross
was notably collective ("these people"), all point to Chomsky
responding not to Haj ‘personally;’ rather, to making him a kind of
scapegoat for someone he perhaps felt deserted by, Postal, and someone
he seems genuinely to have disliked, Lakoff. It’s still unforgiveable
to drown out a former student and junior professor like that, but
these lineaments make Chomsky's obnoxiousness a little more explicable
than the narrow character-assassination interpretation it usually
gets. Worth noting, too, is that Chomsky's heavy involvement in the
anti-Vietnam war efforts of the time (writing, speaking engagements,
protests, media interviews) might have been gnawing at his nerves as
well.

I also want to explain a correction that Rogers notes in the third
printing of the second edition of “Linguistics Wars”, but that he
leaves hanging. The first and second printings of the new edition read
as follows:

In 1949, a shatteringly precocious undergraduate did write in his
senior thesis that the set of sentences generated by the linguistic
system he was investigating was “not necessarily finite,” and
therefore that “the resulting grammar will in general contain a
recursive specification of a denumerable set of sentences” (Chomsky
1979 [1949]:67), an insight that has driven the field of linguistics,
through a welter of instantiations and reactions, pretty much ever
since. It’s been a bumpy ride. Several instantiations grew mutually
antagonistic, most dramatically with the Generative Semantics Heresy,
and all of them were definitionally antagonistic to various other
approaches. But Chomsky, the presence, has towered over the field for
the better part of a century since that thesis[.] (2021, 416)

This passage basically says that a twenty-one year old undergraduate
discovered the importance of recursion as a defining facet of
grammatical modelling, propagating a feature of Chomskyan mythology.
Young Isaac Newton was hit on the head by an apple. Young Noam Chomsky
was struck by recursive function theory. As Rogers notes, the text has
been fixed to now read:

In the early 1950s, a shatteringly precocious young Chomsky did begin
a research program anchored to the insight that ‘grammar will in
general contain a recursive specification of a denumerable set of
sentences’ (Chomsky 1979 [1951]:67n2), an insight that has driven the
field of linguistics pretty much ever since. It’s been a bumpy ride.
Several variations on that theme grew mutually antagonistic, most
dramatically with the Generative Semantics Heresy, and all of them
were foundationally antagonistic to various other approaches. But
Chomsky, the presence, has towered over the field for the better part
of a century since he first wielded his recursion insight[.]

In short, the claim that a "recursive specification" insight occurs in
Chomsky's undergraduate thesis needed to be voided. It was wrong, and
frankly I should have known it was wrong. No doubt Rogers didn't
bother to explain the correction because it seems so trivial, a tiny
and arcane scholium on the very tangled history of Transformational
Generative Grammar and its master architect. But it is worth
explaining the error here, as a symptom of how unreliable that history
can be.

Chomsky is untrustworthy with facts, not least with the facts of his
own personal history, and he also reworked his exploratory early
writings (his Undergraduate and Master's theses (1979/1951) and
“Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory” (1975/1955)), the writings in
which he first pursues issues of generativity and formulates his
breakaway version of Transformational Grammar, rejigging those texts
at a time when he viewed this research, in his own phrase, as "a
private hobby" (Chomsky, 1975/1955, 29). His most shocking breach of
the facts, to a degree that is hard to distinguish from deception, if
not malice, is his recurrent claims that his supervisor for all three
theses at the University of Pennsylvania couldn't be bothered to read
any of them (Harris 2018a), casually implying an extraordinary degree
of professional negligence. (Fortunately, he seems finally to have
backed away from this insistence—see McElvenny 2022.)

With respect to the idea that a grammar must ‘recursively specify a
denumerable set of sentences,’ Chomsky seems clearly to have lit on
this notion by the mid-1950s. There's just no evidence it participates
in his undergraduate or masters theses, as I originally wrote. The
thing is, Chomsky implies in several places that the notion does date
to those works (Barsky 1998, 53-55; Chomsky 2020, 5; Schiffman 2013,
184-185; see also Freidin 2014, 139; 2019, 2), which is where I got it
from. I should certainly have known better, but I wasn't careful
enough with my note taking and overlooked the fact that the crucial
phrasing ("not necessarily finite … recursive specification”) occurs
only in a footnote to the 1979 publication. The original documents are
difficult to obtain, but Daniels (2010) closely compares two versions
of Chomsky's Master's thesis (one that immediately incorporated his
senior thesis and was accepted to earn his degree and one that he
significantly re-edited as he calibrated and reshaped his ideas; the
latter is the text of Chomsky 1979/1951).

Shortly after the publication of my second edition, both Bruce Nevin
and Geoffrey K. Pullum contacted me to remind me of how Daniels's
essay falsifies the provenance claim of recursion back to Chomsky's
Senior thesis, and Oxford UP was good enough to agree to a correction.

Chomsky was, I would be the last one to dispute, an absolute prodigy,
but perhaps marginally less prodigious than my original passage,
leaning on his own accounts, claims him to be. Again, this is a very
small wrinkle in the historical fabric of generative grammar,
backdating a claim a few years, but it clearly reveals something that
anyone writing about Chomsky's life and intellectual contributions
needs to be aware of, and which is impossible to miss, namely his
unreliability with the facts, but which very few of his chroniclers
acknowledge. Most just take his word as gospel.

Chomsky's questionable accuracy about the timing of his generative
insight might be attributable to all kinds of things, but it patterns
with many other mischaracterizations, which I chart in the book (in
particular, pages 363-421; see also Harris 2018a, 2018b).

Returning to Rogers's review, I also want to note my particular
appreciation that he singled out my expanded account of Robin Lakoff's
contributions for notice (see also Goldsmith 2022). One of my
(several) regrets about the first edition that I tried to redress in
the second is that I did not give her sufficient due for her role in
the development of linguistics through the "Wars" and beyond. My
attempt to do so now, I also want to acknowledge, is due in large part
to complaints from George Lakoff. He was kind enough to correspond
with me about the manuscript of the first edition, mostly expressing
disagreement. We tried to resolve our differences, but it didn't end
especially well.

When I agreed to write a new edition, the first thing I did was to
revisit all the reviews and the correspondence around the first
edition, especially concentrating on the critical aspects. G. Lakoff
was adamant in our correspondence that I was negligent with respect to
R. Lakoff's role at the time and her subsequent impact on the field. I
also revisited the original literature and tracked post-bellum
developments closely and soon realized he was right. I may not have
fully corrected the record on her place in the history of the field,
but the new edition sketches it out in more detail and with more
appreciation.

One final point with respect to Rogers’s review, a predictable one I'm
sure. He concludes that the Linguistic Wars of the 1960s and 1970s
amounted to “an academic conflict which seemed important at the time,
but in retrospect seems rather less so.” I wouldn't have written, and
especially rewritten, the book if I believed that. Rogers's
retrospective re-evaluation of its significance is perhaps connected
to the pessimism he also expresses about the role of theory in
linguistics, remarking that it is of little consequence to the
Ordinary Working Grammarian.

The Generative/Interpretive Semantics dispute was not a pointless
squabble by belligerents over best forgotten theoretical
technicalities. My motivation for a second edition comes from exactly
the opposite place, a conviction that the linguistics of the
twenty-first century, the linguistics of now, would be very different
without that fracturing of an impending Chomskyan hegemony. I'll leave
it to your imagination what an alternate history might look like, but
my own feeling is that there would have been much less room to develop
the varieties of Cognitive Linguistics that are now flourishing and
that even such influential Chomskyan phases as Principles and
Parameters may not have arisen without the friction of Generative
Semantics. At its core, the Minimalist Program, with its Basic
Property, is Generative Semantics. What would the linguistics of now
look like if Postal and Chomsky and Lakoff had collaborated on "a
computational system coded in the brain that for each individual
recursively generates an infinite array of hierarchically structured
expressions, each formulating a thought, each potentially externalized
in some sensory-motor (SM) medium" (Chomsky 2021b, 6), the best theory
that Chomsky apparently wanted to defer for twenty years?

My argument, explored narratively as well as logically, is that
social, personal, and institutional dynamics shape research in very
ramified ways. Certainly these factors, as the book reveals, extend
much more dramatically the daily, ordinary work of linguists than
Rogers acknowledges. “The OWG, fortunately, was relatively unaffected
by the wars,” Rogers says. That's not what I heard, repeatedly. On the
personal level, linguists trying to go about their ordinary, daily
work faced hiring difficulties, publication obstacles, even access to
data, not just for being on the wrong side of various theoretical
ideologies, by some hiring committee's or granting committee's or
editorial board's metrics, but also for failing to be on the right
side of their metrics; neutrality was rarely an option for a decade
and beyond. But more to the point these OWGs are, as Pullum notes,
'shadowy figures' (1999, 1), straw mannequins propped up to poke
sticks at, … who? Extraordinary Working Grammarians? Ordinary
Non-Working Grammarians? Real linguists, in real hallways and real
classrooms and real fields, need access to the instruments of
pragmatics, figural language, constructions, semantic frames, X-bar
theory, nominalization rules, and so on, all of which have their roles
in linguistics in very substantial measure because of the Great
Generative Disruption of the 1970s.

CLARIFICATIONS AND ERRATA

Rogers quibbles that I put my closing profile of James D. McCawley in
the chapter entitled "The Aftermath: Twenty-First Century Linguistics"
because "McCawley died in 1999, which, the last time [he] checked, was
not in the twenty-first century" McCawley did indeed pass away in
1999, on the 10th of April to be exact. But the profiles in that
chapter are meant to address legacies, not biological existence, and
while McCawley may unfortunately be read less and less these days, no
one stopped reading his work on the 11th of April .1999, not even at
11:59 on the final day of the twentieth century; nor did his more
diffuse scholarly influence (can you say "logical form"?) go up in
smoke with the end-of-millennium fireworks.

Rogers says, somewhat abashedly, that "[Harris's] degree is in
technical writing." I do in fact have a degree in Technical
Communication, of which I am justly proud, as well as degrees in
literature and psycholinguistics, but my terminal degree, which is
what people usually mean when they name only one, is in Rhetoric.

Rogers says that Chomsky was Robert Lees’s supervisor. That is true in
spirit, but Morris Halle was Lees's supervisor of record.

Chomsky, A. Noam. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge:
MIT Press.

Chomsky, A. Noam. (1972/1969). Some Empirical Issues in the Theory of
Transformational Grammar. Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar.
The Hague: Mouton.

Chomsky, A. Noam. (1975/1955 [preface dated 1973]). Logical Structure
of Linguistic Theory. New York: Plenum Press. Also available as a PDF
download, at alpha- leonis.lids.mit.edu/ chomsky/.

Chomsky, A. Noam. (1979/1951). Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew. New
York: Garland Publishing.

Chomsky, A. Noam. (2021a). Linguistics Then and Now: Some Personal
Reflections. Annual Review of Linguistics 7, 1-11. https://www.annualr
eviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-081720-111352.

Chomsky, A. Noam. (2021b). Minimalism: Where Are We Now, and Where Can
We Hope to Go. 言語研究（Gengo Kenkyu),160: 1–41, doi:
10.11435/gengo.160.0_1.

Daniels Peter T. (2010). Chomsky 1951a and Chomsky 1951b. In Douglas
Kibbee, ed., Chomskyan (R)evolutions. Amsterdam: John Benjamins,
169-214.

Friedin, Robert. (2014). Recursion in Generative Grammar. In Francis
Lowenthal and Laurent Lefebvre, eds., Language and Recursion. Berlin:
Springer, 139-149.

Freidin, Robert. (2019). Preface. Noam Chomsky: The UCLA Lectures.
Introduced, transcribed, and edited by Robert Freidin. LingBuzz
https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005485.

Goldsmith, John. (2022). Randy Harris’s Second Take on the Linguistics
Wars [text and video]. History and Philosophy of the Language
Sciences. 24 October.
https://hiphilangsci.net/2022/10/24/randy-harris-linguistics-wars/.

Harris, Randy Allen. (2018a). The History of a Science: Unreliable
Narrators and How Science Moves On. openDemocracy 9 May. https://www.o
pendemocracy.net/en/history-of-science-unreliable-narrators-and-how-sc
ience-moves-on/.

Harris, Randy Allen. (2018b). Hello Wolfgang. openDemocracy, November
8. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/response-to-wolfgang-sperlich-on-l
atter-day-critics-of-noam-chomsky/.

Harris, Randy Allen. (2021). The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff,
and the Battle Over Deep Structure. Second edition. New York: Oxford
University Press.

Huck, Geoffrey J., and John Goldsmith. (1995). Ideology and Linguistic
Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates. New York:
Routledge.

McElvenny, James. (2022). Podcast episode 23: Interview with Noam
Chomsky on the Beginnings of Generative Grammar [audio and
transcript]. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. 1 March.
https://hiphilangsci.net/2022/03/01/podcast-episode-23/.

Postal, Paul M. (1972/1969). The Best Theory. In Stanley Peters, ed.,
Goals of linguistic theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice- Hall.

Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1999). Formal Linguistics and the Ordinary
Working Grammarian. Papers of the Mid-America Linguistics Conference.
KU Scholar Works. http://hdl.handle.net/1808/23094

Rogers, Andy. (2022). Review: History of Linguistics: Harris (2021).
LINGUIST List 33.3261. https://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-3261/.

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Syntax




------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2022 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
                   https://crowdfunding.iu.edu/the-linguist-list

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3742
----------------------------------------------------------