topics: |  language | history | linguistics | politics

This is an uneven book, with two interpretations of its title that don't
sit easily with each otheer.  In the first chapter "War" is the well-known
showdown between Chomsky and his rebel followers, conducted with great
mud-slinging on both sides. Later in the book, it becomes a second and
completely unrelated type of "war" - at the level of gender and politics.
Of the two wars, the writing is passionate and cler when talking of the
first war in the early 70s, where Robin Lakoff discusses the
disillusionment of people like herself and her (now ex-) husband, the noted
linguist George Lakoff, when Chonsky gradually turned away from semantics.

The Chomskyan revolution

Chapter 1 ("What am I doing here") presents a compact description of the
limited goals of the Chomskyan view of linguistics, and what led to
disillusionment among the Lakoffs and others.  This is summarized through
some quotations/notes below.

As the field of linguistics experienced a boom in the late 50s after
Chomsky's Transformational Generative Grammar, at least three very different
kinds of people entered linguistics with three very diff assumptions , and
hence diametrically opp views of what we ought to be doing, what scientific
study of language meant, etc. :

  a) Those who had been trained as social scientists, anthropologists
     interested in learning about languages other than the familiar IE ones
     as a way of understanding other cultures.
  b) Those trained as humanists, whose interests lay in the hermenuetic
     potential of TGG.  We wanted a way to determine, from their superficial
     form, what sentences "really" meant at a deeper level, why people made
     the choices they made, and what those choices signified about
     ourselves.
  c) Those who entered from math / formal logic.  For them language was above all a
     system whose properties could be formalized in equation-like rules.
     They were less interested in the relationships between language and culture,
     and language and thought, than in the relations that held between the parts of
     sentences.

This last was the centerpiece of the Chomskyan project, as those of us who
had entered it under one of the other auspices would ruefully discover.  The
3 kinds of linguists made strange, increasingly uneasy bedfellows.

To the formal (i.e. strictly Chonmskyan) TGGian, the linguist's task was
discovering the abstract grammar of the lg, the grammar of

	ideal speaker-listener in a completely homogeneous speech community,
	who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such irrelevant
	conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention
	and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his
	knowledge of language in actual performance" (Chomsky 1965 p.3)

language variants were deemed of little importance, and context, though it affected
both form and its understanding, was essentially irrelevant.

Empirical data gathered from people's actual utterances was not only not
necessary, it was undesirable: it might be corrupt, tainted by trivial
external influences, "performative factors."  Transformational theory
directed its practitioners to produce the data that they then analyzed, and
those analyses formed the basis for theories.

The justification was that to not use such superficial data would be to go
back to that dangerous yesteryear, and to move linguistics further from
"science", where rational people who craved respectability wished to reside.

[Robin Lakoff and some others were not happy with this formalist approach.
They wanted to understand why men and women don't quite speak the same
language, why advertising keeps influencing 20th c. sophisticates, and how
lawyers on two sides can describe the same scenario in completely
contradictory ways, leading to verdicts that make no sense (e.g. the OJ
Simpson verdict).  This constitute the bulk of the rest of the book. - AM