Modern linguistics: The results of Chomsky's revolution By Neil Smith and Deirdre Wilson (review)

REVIEWS Modern linguistics: The results of Chomsky's revolution. By Neil Smith and Deirdre Wilson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979. Pp. 334. $17.50. Reviewed by Robert I. Binnick, University of Toronto The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips once said, 'Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.' On the same topic, the Yugoslav political thinker Milovan Djilas wrote, 'Every revolution ... creates illusions and is conducted in the name of unrealizable ideals.' Surely both quotations are apposite when applied to 'Chomsky's revolution'. Relevant too is a comment from Albert Camus: 'Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic' 'Modern linguistics', as Smith & Wilson understand it, is Generative Linguistics , and they see it as the end product of a revolution. They—along with their publishers—believe that 'experts in [philosophy, psychology, and education ] ignore the Chomskian revolution at their peril.' S&W tell us in the introduction that, in 1957, these revolutionary ideas started to cause linguistics to begin to be of interest to scholars in these fields; and it is stated that the purpose of this book is to give, to these scholars and others, S&W's 'own account of these conclusions'. Taken as a summation and explication of the main currents of contemporary generativist linguistic thought, this book is unexceptionable. It is extraordinarily lucid, clear, well-written, and comprehensive. The dozen chapters (each of roughly twenty pages) cover a wide scope: 'What is a language?', 'Knowledge of language', 'Types of linguistic knowledge', 'Formalizing linguistic knowledge', 'For and against deep structure', 'Phonetics and phonology', 'Semantics and meaning', 'Pragmatics and communication', 'Language variation ', 'Language change', 'Evaluation of grammars', and 'What is language?' Following these chapters are a useful, well-done glossary with about 150 entries (from 'absolute neutralization' to 'yes-no question') and a thorough, practical index. Since the book lacks certain pieces of ancillary apparatus, it cannot serve as a textbook. It is intended, rather, for the general reader interested in understanding contemporary linguistics and specifically desiring an explication of Chomsky's ideas—the inherent difficulty of which, when combined with Chomsky's written and oratorical style, sometimes approaches that of Finnegaris wake. As an introduction to linguistic ideas, however, it is seriously flawed in several respects: (1)'Modern linguistics' is very misleading. Even if Generative Grammar were all of linguistics, and even ifareas not ofconcern to GG were ofno value (e.g. sociolinguistics, pidgin-creole studies, contrastive linguistics), should not the ingénu be warned offfrom such pseudo-science? S&W give no hint that counter-revolutionaries lurk in the halls of academe. (2)Assuming that modern linguistics is the result of Chomsky's revolution, it is unfair to Harris and to Halle (if not to Katz, Postal, Fodor, and others) to suggest that everything in this book was Chomsky's brainchild. Although S&W give good references, they generally make no effort to 182 REVIEWS183 distinguish Chomsky's own contributions from ideas simply current in the field. Of course, the vast majority of what is discussed here does not come from Chomsky. Even Stalin's sycophants admitted the existence of Lenin. (3)Revolutions generally result from pre-revolutionary conditions. S&W not only omit the names of those who stormed the Winter Palace; they aren't even prepared to discuss the old regime. It seems odd to discuss an intellectual revolution without so much as mentioning the ideas it was meant to supplant; we may wonder why a revolution was needed at all, for example. But S&W note that, 'in writing this book, we had to make two choices': 'First, how much attention should we give to Chomsky's immediate precursors and his present rivals: should this book be based on historical comparisons? Second, how much should we try to give a historical treatment of the development of Chomsky's own thought? In particular, there have been substantial changes in Chomsky's technical analyses of individual points ... over the past twenty years ...' The reader who is impatient with the confusions engendered by post-revolutionary chaos (one thinks here of the confused chronology and constant re-alignments of the French and Mexican revolutions), will be glad that S&W 'decided...