ABSTRACT
Geoffrey J.Huck and John A.Goldsmith’s (1995) Ideology and Linguistic Theory (henceforth ILT) defends a revisionist account of the debates between generative and interpretive semanticists of the late 1960s and early 1970s. According to what they call the ‘standard story’ (1995:2), told in Jackendoff (1983); Katz and Bever (1976); Newmeyer (1980, 1986); and Riemsdijk and Williams (1986), generative semantics collapsed primarily because it was empirically disconfirmed. Problematically for such a view, however:
significant chunks of what were evidently standard generative semantics analyses began to reappear in the syntax literature shortly after the movement’s demise and are now often regarded as constituting preferred solutions to contemporary problems. Indeed, the picture of grammar presented in much contemporary work, including, for example, Chomsky’s Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) and Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use (1986), is similar enough in certain crucial respects to that painted by generative semantics in the late 1960s that one who accepts the standard story must be prepared to explain why criticisms of the latter do not also apply to the former.
