IDEOLOGY AND LINGUISTIC THEORY Page Intentionally Left Blank IDEOLOGY AND LINGUISTIC THEORY Noam Chomsky and the deep structure debates Geoffrey J Huck and John A. Goldsmith History of Linguistic Thought London and New York First published 1995 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OXl4 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Reprinted 1996 Transferred to Digital Printing 2007 First published in paperback 1996 © 1995 Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith Typeset in Baskerville by LaserScript Ltd, Mitcham, Surrey All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-415-11735-6 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-15313-1 (pbk) Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent To our teachers Bill]. Darden,James D. McCawley, andJerrold M. Sadock Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, andJohn Robert Ross To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius. Ralph Waldo Emerson CONTENTS Preface viii 1 In trod uction 1 2 Gaps in the paradigm: Mediational and distributional themes in theoretical syntax 5 3 Rhetorical strategies and linguistic argumentation: Three case studies 59 4 What happened to Generative Semantics? 79 5 Conclusion 91 Appendix: Conversations with Ray Jackendoff, George Lakoff, John 97 Robert Ross, and Paul M. Postal Notes 143 References 165 Index 179 vii PREFACE It has been customary in science to attempt to separate ideas from those who have had them. Increasingly, historians of science have argued that it is misleading to do so, that what are often thought of as personal or social factors playa nontrivial role in the conduct of scientific inquiry. If this is true in science generally it is surely true in linguistics, where for three decades and more the academic stage has been dominated by the imposing persona of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's importance and influence in lin- guistic work worldwide during this period has been unmatched, and there are few who doubt that his views will continue to affect profoundly the direction of theoretical discussion in linguistics for years to come. As significant as Chomsky's views have been for linguistics and the cognitive sciences, he is not the only intellectually respected figure who has been engaged in theory construction in these fields during his lifetime. And in fact Chomsky has made it clear that much of his work has been done in response to the work of those with whom he has found himself in disagreement - sometimes in vigorous disagreement. To consider his ideas apart from this con text would be to miss a great deal of what has given them their distinctive flavor and con temporary appeal. This is not to suggest that conflict and controversy have played a suspicious role in the advancement of these ideas; to the contrary, we understand that scholarly argument forms a crucial part of scientific life and that the acquisition of knowledge depends vitally on the questioning of dogma. But it is certainly a measure of how deeply they have cut that Chomsky's critiques have received the atten tion they have; indeed, a number of the academic argumen ts in which he has been involved have become so concentrated and so fraught with controversy that they have managed to catch the notice even of those who might otherwise have had no interest in the scientific issues themselves. Among these, Chomsky's dispute with the Generative Semanticists in the late 1960s particularly stands out. This dispute was notable not simply because it became so bitter, but also because it involved a goodly propor- tion of the theoretical linguistics community at the time and represented Vlll PREFACE what has clearly been the most serious organized challenge to Chomsky's views to date. The four Generative Semanticists who were at the center of these dis- agreements with Chomsky were Paul Postal, George Lakoff,James McCawley, and John Robert Ross. Postal was a colleague of Chomsky's at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s who moved to the City University of New York in 1965 and then to IBM in 1967. McCawley and Ross had been students of Chomsky's and Postal's at MIT; McCawley accepted a position at the University of Chicago in 1964, and Ross was appointed to the faculty at MIT in 1966. Lakoff completed his dissertation in 1965 at Indiana University, then becoming a researcher and instructor at Harvard. In fact, Generative Semantics, as a coherent research program, did not last long. By the end of the 1970s, none of the original Generative Seman- ticists was still involved in that program at least under that standard, although Chomsky's competing program was steadily gaining adherents. To explain this turn of events, many have concluded that Generative Semantics ultimately failed in consequence of certain inherent inade- quacies of thevry: either the theories offered by Generative Semanticists were empirically falsified, or they were overly powerful, or they attempted too much. In each case it has been supposed that the failures were necessary failures, and that they followed from the theory-constructing behavior of the Generative Semanticists themselves. But while the Generative Semanticists unquestionably faced theoretical obstacles of various sorts, there are also good reasons to believe that the demise of their program was not a consequence of theoretical weakness. Indeed, we will argue in what follows that it is not possible to find, internal to the idea of Generative Semantics as it was evidently originally under- stood by Lakoff, McCawley, Postal, and Ross, adequate grounds to explain its widespread abandonment in the 1970s. We will be concerned to evalu- ate the linguistic evidence on its own terms, paying particular attention to the theoretical assumptions that underlay the various critiques, and will conclude that one must turn to external explanations to account ade- quately for what transpired. But although external factors undoubtedly affected the way that the various proposals in the dispute were understood and received, we would also suggest that a focus on the relatively dramatic personal and social aspects of the interactions in which the participants were involved has tended to obscure the conceptual significance of the positions they took. In fact, those positions were considerably more com- patible theoretically than one might suppose, given the animosities that developed as the issues were debated. We will assume in this book at least passing familiarity with the goals and methods of modern generative linguistics, such as might be acquired from an introductory text. We should emphasize that we will not attempt a IX