The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle Over Deep Structure

An updated and expanded history of the field of linguistics from the 1950s to the current day

The Linguistics Wars tells the tumultuous history of language and cognition studies from the rise of Noam Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar to the current day. Focusing on the rupture that split the field between Chomsky’s structuralist vision and George Lakoff’s meaning-driven theories, Randy Allen Harris portrays the extraordinary personalities that were central to the dispute and its aftermath, alongside the data, technical developments, and social currents that fueled the unfolding and expanding schism. This new edition, updated to cover the more than twenty-five years since its original publication and to trace the impact of that schism on the shape of linguistics in the twenty-first century, is essential reading for all those interested in the study of language, the making of knowledge, and some of the most brilliant minds of our era.

Randy Allen Harris is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. His books include Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the New Conversational Interfaces, Rhetoric and Incommensurability, two volumes in the Routledge Landmark Essays series, both in aspects of Rhetoric
of Science; and The Linguistics Wars.