ABSTRACT
It is hard today to appreciate the vehemence with which the debate between generative semanticists and partisans of the extended standard theory (‘interpretivists’) was carried out in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At times, its heat grew so intense that even in print the rhetoric exceeded the bounds of normal partisan scholarship-witness the description of a paper of McCawley’s as ‘Machiavellian’ (Dougherty 1974:267) and the accusation that Chomsky ‘fights dirty when he argues. He uses every trick in the book’ (G.Lakoff 1972c:70L). As can easily be imagined, the discussion sessions after conference papers provided an arena for far stronger sentiments. The high point (or low point) surely followed the presentation of George Lakoff’s ‘Global rules’ paper at the 1969 Linguistic Society of America meeting, in which for several minutes he and Ray Jackendoff hurled amplified obscenities at each other before 200 embarassed onlookers. There is hardly a need to mention the personal animosities engendered, some of which smoulder still.
