ABSTRACT

It was once uncontroversial to refer to a ‘Chomskyan revolution’ in linguistics.1 Commentators took it for granted that the publication in 1957 of Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky ushered in an intellectual and sociological revolution in the field-a revolution that deepened with the following decade’s work by Chomsky and his associates. The term ‘Chomskyan revolution’ has appeared in the titles of articles (Searle 1972) and book chapters (Newmeyer 1980), and an historian of linguistics has written that the work of Chomsky ‘fully meets [the philosopher Thomas] Kuhn’s twin criteria for a paradigm [in science]’ (Koerner 1976:709). Even Chomsky’s professional opponents have acknowledged the revolutionary nature of his effect on linguistics. Geoffrey Sampson, who feels that ‘the ascendancy of the Chomskyan school has been a very unfortunate development for the discipline of linguistics’ (Sampson 1980), nevertheless writes that ‘Chomsky is commonly said to have brought about a “revolution” in linguistics, and the political metaphor is apt’ (ibid.: 130). And Robert Longacre, an individual who has a quite different orientation to grammar from Chomsky’s, writes that ‘the field was profoundly shaken by him’ (Longacre 1979), and has identified the essence of the Chomskyan revolution (a term which he uses without surrounding quotes) as its commitment to the construction of an explanatory linguistic theory.