ABSTRACT
Until around 1965, generative theoreticians had been united on virtually every important issue. In one sense, this is hardly surprising-Aspects was written by Chomsky with constant feedback from the faculty and students at MIT, who made up at least 90 per cent of the transformational grammarians in the world at that time. Yet, even by late 1965, the first public signs of division had appeared. In the autumn of that year, Paul Postal argued at a colloquium held at MIT that adjectives were members of the category ‘Verb’—a conclusion quite uncongenial to Chomsky’s view of English syntax. The following spring, John Robert Ross, a graduate student and instructor at MIT, and George Lakoff, a part-time instructor at Harvard and associate in its computation laboratory, organized a series of Friday afternoon seminars in Harvard’s William James Building, devoted to challenging analyses then favoured by Chomsky. In the autumn of 1966, with Chomsky on leave in Berkeley, Ross and Lakoff brought their opposition into the open in their classes. Ross’s class in universal grammar at MIT drew dozens of students; Lakoff’s in syntactic theory at Harvard well over one hundred.
