Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T07:55:38.988Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Generative grammar with a human face?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2003

Shimon Edelman
Shimon Edelman*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601 http://kybele.psych.cornell.edu/~edelman/
*
se37@cornell.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 26 , Issue 6 , December 2003 , pp. 675 - 676
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)
Supplementary material: PDF

Download undefined(PDF)
PDF 663.1 KB