In this interview, we talk to Randy Harris about the controversies surrounding the generative semantics movement in American linguistics of the 1960s and 70s.

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References for Episode 42

Chomsky, N. (2015/1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax (50th Anniversary edition.). The MIT Press.

Harris, R. A. (2021/1993). The linguistics wars: Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff, and the battle over Deep Structure (2nd ed.). Oxford.

Huck, G. J., & Goldsmith, J. A. (1995). Ideology and linguistic theory: Noam Chomsky and the deep structure debates. Routledge.

Katz, J. J., & Postal, P. M. (1964). An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions. M.I.T. Press.

McCawley, J. D. (1980). Linguistic theory in America: The first quarter-century of transformational generative grammar, by Frederick J. Newmeyer (Book Review). Linguistics, 18(9), 911-930.

Newmeyer, F. J. (1986/1980). Linguistic theory in America: The first quarter-century of transformational generative grammar (2nd ed.). Academic Press.

Postal, P. M. (1972). The best theory. In S. Peters (Ed.), Goals of linguistic theory. Prentice-Hall.

Postal, P. M. (1988). Topic…Comment: Advances in linguistic rhetoric. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 6(1), 129–137.

Transcript by Luca Dinu

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, [00:14 ] online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:17 ] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:21 ] Today we’re talking to Randy Harris, [00:24 ] who is Professor of both English Language and Literature and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. [00:32 ] Among other things, Randy is the author of The Linguistics Wars, [00:37 ] the classic account of the generative semantics controversy that engulfed generative linguistics in the 1960s and ’70s. [00:45 ] A second edition of Randy’s book came out in 2021, and I’ve been wanting to talk to him about it since then, [00:52 ] but as a history podcast, we are by definition behind the times, [00:57 ] so it’s only appropriate that we’re only getting to his book now. [01:01 ] So, Randy, can you tell us, what were the linguistics wars? [01:05 ] Who were the chief combatants, and what were they fighting about? [01:09 ]

RH: Well, first, thanks for inviting me on. I’m a big fan of the podcast. [01:13 ] It’s a really important and interesting podcast about the history of linguistics, [01:18 ] and I’m also a fan of your work, your Ogden book, Language and Meaning. [01:22 ] It is really, really valuable, and I’m looking forward to the new one that you’ve got coming out on the history of modern linguistics. [01:30 ] So, maybe the best way to start is just to talk about how I entered the project in the first place. [01:35 ] So, I was a PhD student, and I just discovered a field called rhetoric. [01:41 ] My other degrees were in literature and linguistics before I got there, [01:46 ] and I was casting around. I’d originally gone to do communication theory, [01:50 ] but it turned out that the department wasn’t as strong in that as I thought, [01:54 ] and they had a really good rhetorician, and he was doing something called rhetoric of science, [01:59 ] which is basically the study of scientific argumentation. [02:03 ] I started reading in that field quite a bit and studying under him, Michael Halloran, [02:08 ] and then when it came time to write a dissertation, I started casting around for scientific episodes. [02:14 ] One of the themes of rhetoric of science at that point was mostly looking at controversies, [02:19 ] looking at how scientific disputes get resolved or fail to get resolved through warring camps. [02:25 ] I read Fritz Newmeyer’s book, Linguistic Theory in America, [02:29 ] and one of the key chapters is about this group called the generative semanticists and Chomsky coming at odds with each other, [02:39 ] but I’d also read a review of the book by James McCawley, [02:42 ] who was one of the people associated with the linguistics wars on the generative semanticists’ side, [02:47 ] and it was fairly polite, but said that basically Newmeyer’s book didn’t tell the whole story. [02:53 ] So I thought, “Well, I’d look into this a bit,” and I wrote basically all of the major players. [02:58 ] So I wrote Chomsky, of course, and the major players on the generative semanticists’ side were Paul Postal, [03:06 ] who was a colleague of Chomsky’s just before that, George Lakoff, John Robert Ross (Haj Ross), [03:13 ] and Ray Jackendoff, who was aligned with Chomsky in this dispute, [03:17 ] but also a lot of people around the dispute [03:21 ] — Jerrold Katz, Jerry Fodor, Thomas Bever, Arnold Zwicky, Jay Keyser, Robert Lees, Morris Halle, Jerry Sadock, Howard Lasnik, [03:30 ] just everybody who had seemed to have something to say about that dispute and about the theories around them — [03:37 ] and I got just an overwhelming response. [03:40 ] Everybody wanted to talk about it. [03:43 ] I can’t remember the exact order in which it happened, whether it was a response to a letter that invited me to call or a phone call as a response to my initial letter to Lakoff, [03:52 ] but Lakoff and I were on the phone for like an hour and a half one night, [03:56 ] him just going through what everything was all about. [03:59 ] So this was 20 years after the dispute, more or less, and everybody was still wanting to talk about it. [04:06 ] There were still hurt feelings and incensed attitudes and so forth, [04:10 ] and I was coming at it from a completely different discipline and a PhD student, [04:16 ] not anybody really in the field, and all of them wanted to talk to me. [04:20 ] So it grew into a kind of oral history project. [04:22 ] I travelled around and interviewed them all. [04:25 ] I ended up with like 500-some-odd pages of transcripts of interviews. [04:29 ] I met Lakoff in a bar in Cambridge. I talked to Chomsky for hours in his office. [04:35 ] I went to the University of Chicago, and one of the sociological centre points of the generative semanticist side was the University of Chicago, [04:42 ] especially all of the conferences and publications out of the Chicago Linguistic Society, [04:47 ] and talked to McCawley and Sadock and so forth there. [04:50 ] So everybody wanted to talk about it. [04:52 ] It was a really interesting story. [04:54 ] What was it? I’ll give you the scientific development story first. [04:58 ] So Noam Chomsky and his collaborators, most prominently Paul Postal and Gerald Katz, [05:06 ] developed a theory coalesced in the book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965 [05:12 ] that had this central notion of deep structure. [05:16 ] The model itself was structured as a process model where you generate sentences, [05:22 ] and it was a sentence grammar, not an utterance grammar. [05:25 ] All of the proponents denied that it was a process. [05:28 ] They just talked about it as an abstract model of linguistic knowledge in some way, [05:32 ] but it was shaped as a process model in which you had a set of syntactic rules, [05:37 ] phrase structure rules, that generated a syntactic structure [05:41 ] and a bag of words, a dictionary, a lexicon, that then populated the structure. [05:48 ] And then what you got was the deep structure, which wasn’t what we speak with [05:55 ] or write with, but an underlying representation that somehow crystallized [06:00 ] essential aspects of how we speak, one of them being semantic. [06:05 ] So a paradigm case would be the passive transformation. [06:09 ] The phrase structure rules and lexicon give you something like [06:13 ] “John walked the dog,” and that mi