Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates (review)

This fascinating book seeks to account for the “collapse” of a linguistic research program of the 1960s and 1970s known as “generative semantics,” occasioned by its contretemps with archrival “interpretive semantics,” which, while winning the battle, was thereby transmogrified.

Ironic throughout, it begins with a frontispiece citation of Emerson’s many-layered irony that “to believe what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.” The book’s framing irony is the syllogism that (1) criticism and the growth of knowledge in deductive science takes place by the falsification of claims, which leaves in place claims less falsified; (2) linguistics is a deductive science; and (3) surviving linguistic ideas have withstood the tests of falsification, while abandoned ones have succumbed.

The book rejects, ambivalently, its own framing syllogism. Alluding to various institutionalist and/or Weltanschauung views of change or progress in science, the authors make the case that the conflicts between these linguistic theories are at the same time conflicts among big egos and big institutions. Evidence for the latter is to be found in the phatic and rhetorical dimensions of discourse (oral, epistolary, and expository) among key linguist-protagonists—about which, more below.

Irony is carried further: the authors show that many of the important ideas, perspectives, and hypotheses of the vanquished theory became, without acknowledgement or perhaps even self-awareness, incorporated into the thinking and apparatus of the victor theory and its own successors. (In fighting, enemies become more and more alike.)

At the outset, readers are apprised that the authors “presume at least passing familiarity with the goals and methods of modern generative linguistics, such as might be acquired from an introductory text” (ix). I came quickly to take this as unintended irony, for to follow just the drift of some of the linguistic debates recounted, one would have to have read several intermediate linguistics textbooks published between 1960 and the mid 1980s. Theirs will be an enjoyable excursion for well-read old-timers, like your reviewer—despite occasional (necessary) lapses into what could appear to the non-professional linguist as Talmudic disputation. The authors are forced at times to carry on in a single voice, like an actor in an audition speaking several parts, to represent the force and meaning of multi-partisan debates that raged three decades ago. For the non-linguist, this declamation could seem at times somewhat arcane or prolix.

The authors opine that “looking back now on the debates of the 1960s and 1970s, one cannot help but be impressed by their inconclusiveness . . . by the way in which fragments of information were routinely transformed into facts which one side thought constituted crucial evidence but which the other side felt were misconstrued or required more study. Since more study rarely confirmed original hypotheses . . . and since many of the ensuing arguments . . . sputtered off in tangential directions . . . it might be more natural to ask whether anything was learned in the debates or whether they simply demonstrate that linguistic theories . . . have been not so much scientific theories as untestable collections of a priori beliefs” (2–3).

The book answers this disjunctive question with an ironically conjunctive “yes, all of the above.” Much was learned about linguistics, grammar, and the processes of linguistic research programs; many of the core beliefs of linguistic science are shown not to be directly testable. Further, the authors demonstrate convincingly that the concerns, questions, and methods of the two schools were in the main complementary, not inconsistent or contradictory, and that each offered the other arguments to think about and then to think with, though this actual food for thought was at the time generally received by the opposing camp as theoretical poison.

In the long second chapter, the authors do a nice job of tracing historically two seemingly competing orientations of 20th century linguistics: (1) concern with the distributional properties of formally defined language units within sentences, and (2) concern...