Customer Reviews

Challenging Chomsky: The Generative Garden Game

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For anyone even mildly interested in linguistics, this book is a unique delight. It is a primer on modern linguistics, disguised as a playful examination of Noam Chomsky's mind, disguised as a collection of whimsical fables. In it, Chomsky (the father of modern linguistics, reigning from his perch at MIT) is presented as the omnipotent 'Master of the Maze,' vanquishing all who challenge his hegemony of the 'Generative Garden.' At its surface, the book poses as an instructional tour of 'the Maze' for you, the hopeful but naive young warrior who dares to match wits with the Master. At each fork in the road, a dire warning is given in the form of a tale of some long-ago warrior that met an untimely end on the spot. The traps and distractions are revealed, the blind alleys and sudden drops are marked. Alternating with these second-person italicized passages of alliterative whimsy is a parallel, more serious, discussion of Chomsky's linguistic edifice of theory and argument. Here, the forks in the road are represented as a series of conceptual distinctions that Chomsky has applied to the topic over the decades since his seminal "Syntactic Structures" was printed. These are beautifully succinct and hone in like scalpels to the essential issues. And then, before your eyes glaze over, its back to the Garden Game and the words of wisdom to those who dare. Most of the major conflicts (as of the time of its writing, i.e., 1989) are humorously portrayed, although I'd bet some of the participants would take issue with Botha's judgement of victory for Chomsky in their case. Amusingly, Botha's own minor run-in with the Master (or his fans) is depicted discreetly as almost a non-event beneath the notice of Chomsky. Basically, this is a work of pure love and devotion to the author's chosen field of study, delivered as a left-handed tribute to the intellectual giant who made it all possible.

P.S. -- For those of you who are mostly familiar with Chomsky's political writings, I commend this book as a small grain of salt to be prudently kept handy.

Chomsky's theory is difficult to most people because there are so many concepts which look alike but in fact are different by nature. Botha's book offers a very good help to the reader who is interested in getting to know Chomsky's linguistics. The book consists of a series of pairs of concepts which make people puzzling, for example, initial state vs. steady state, stable vs. steady, mind vs. body, external autonomy vs. internal autonomy, linguistic universals vs. cross-linguistic generalizations, problems vs. mysteries, and so on and so forth. It should be recommended as a desk-top handbook to the reader of Chomskyan literature.