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Generative grammar with a human face?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2003

Shimon Edelman*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY14853-7601 http://kybele.psych.cornell.edu/~edelman/

Abstract:

The theoretical debate in linguistics during the past half-century bears an uncanny parallel to the politics of the (now defunct) Communist Bloc. The parallels are not so much in the revolutionary nature of Chomsky's ideas as in the Bolshevik manner of his takeover of linguistics (Koerner 1994) and in the Trotskyist (“permanent revolution”) flavor of the subsequent development of the doctrine of Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) (Townsend & Bever 2001, pp. 37–40). By those standards, Jackendoff is quite a party faithful (a Khrushchev or a Dubcek, rather than a Solzhenitsyn or a Sakharov) who questions some of the components of the dogma, yet stops far short of repudiating it.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

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