Introduction

Linguistics is a broadly defined discipline and it is worth noting that only small sub-areas of it regularly come into contact with prehistory. The major effort in the second half of the twentieth century has been in the development of syntactic theory, with Chomsky and other generativists setting the agenda. Even those who oppose generativism have allowed it to set the terms of the debate. Linguistic controversies are very much couched in specific jargons and have become so detailed that entire conferences may now be devoted to a small point of syntax. Little of this has made any impact on historical linguistics, and indeed the classificatory genetic enterprise has frequently been dismissed by generativists.