Has there been a 'Chomskyan revolution' in linguistics?

HAS THERE BEEN A 'CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION' IN LINGUISTICS? Frederick J. Newmeyer University of Washington While it was once uncontroversial to refer to a 'Choraskyan revolution' in linguistics, a number of commentators have recently questioned whether generativist theory truly represents a revolutionary departure from earlier approaches. This paper defends the view that a Chomskyan revolution has indeed occurred—a revolution which began with the publication of Syntactic structures (1957) and which has had profound effects, both intellectually for the study of language and sociologically for the field of linguistics. Paradoxically, however, the revolutionary success of generative grammarians has not resulted in their achieving administrative power in the field—a fact which is both documented and explained.* 1. It was once uncontroversial to refer to a 'Chomskyan revolution' in linguistics . Commentators took it for granted that the publication of Syntactic structures by Noam Chomsky in 1957 ushered in an intellectual and sociological revolution in the field—a revolution that deepened with the following decade's work by Chomsky and his associates. The term 'Chomskyan revolution' has appeared in the titles of articles (Searle 1972) and book chapters (Newmeyer 1980); and an historian of linguistics has written that the work of Chomsky 'fully meets [the philosopher Thomas] Kuhn's twin criteria for a paradigm [in science]' (Koerner 1976:709). Even Chomsky's professional opponents have acknowledged the revolutionary nature ofhis effect on linguistics. G. Sampson, who feels (1980:163) that 'the ascendancy of the Chomskyan school has been a very unfortunate development for the discipline of linguistics', nevertheless writes (130) that 'Chomsky is commonly said to have brought about a "revolution " in linguistics, and political metaphor is apt. ' R. Longacre, an individual who has a quite different orientation to grammar from Chomsky's, writes (1979:247) that 'the field was profoundly shaken by him', and has identified the essence of the Chomskyan revolution (a term which he uses without surrounding quotes) as its commitment to the construction of an explanatory linguistic theory. However, the idea that the field ever underwent a 'Chomskyan revolution' has been challenged in recent years, and the challenges appear to be on the increase. Koerner has now reconsidered his earlier position and believes (1983:152) that 'upon closer inspection, the term "revolution" does not properly apply to TGG.' The sociologist S. Murray, whose professional specialty is the informal groupings and networks within the field oflinguistics (see Murray 1983), writes that 'Chomsky did not make a revolution with [Syntactic structures ]' (1980:81); rather, he and his associates engineered a 'palace coup' (82) in the early 1960's. In this view, Murray echoes the opinions of R. Anttila, * I would like to thank Joseph Emonds, James McCawley, Sol Saporta, William Bright, Keith Percival, David Lightfoot, Geoffrey Pullum, Noam Chomsky, Patricia Keating, and Richard Ogle for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper. It goes without saying that they bear no responsibility for errors of either fact or interpretation. 1 2 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 62, NUMBER 1 (1986) who, with 'an increasing number of linguists, ha[s] realized that this allegedly linguistic revolution was a social coup d'état' (1975:171); and of B. Gray, who finds no Chomskyan revolution, but only a situation in which, 'as all admit, transformationalists have succeeded in capturing the organs of power' (1976:49). Those who see the generativist ascendency as little more than a successful power grab tend to regard generative grammar as essentially postBloomfieldian business as usual. As Koerner puts it (1983:152), 'TGG is basically post-Saussurean structuralism, characterized by excessive concern with ''langue'' ... to the detriment of ''parole'' . . .' Others do believe that Chomskyan theory represents a fundamental break with its antecedents, but one which did not occur with the publication of Syntactic structures. Rather, it is felt that Chomsky departed from earlier traditions only in the early 1960's, when he and his associates began to campaign against the autonomous phoneme (for such a view, see Hill 1980:75)—or in the middle years of that decade, when he began explicitly to embrace a 'rationalist' philosophical basis for the theory (see Uhlenbeck 1975:106-8). In this paper, I will defend the position that Chomskyan theory represents a revolutionary approach to the...