Customer Reviews

The Linguistics Wars

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This really is one of the best books about linguistics ever written--maybe the best. As a linguist, it brought me to a whole new level of insight about my field. I wish I'd read it before I ever started graduate school, instead of afterwards--every graduate student should read this before taking their first syntax course. I managed to make it through six years of graduate school without ever understanding why people found syntax and semantics interesting; this book helped me to understand why they did. That's not really the best thing about this book, though; the best thing about it is the story that it tells about an exciting and turbulent time in the scientific field that's more interesting (to me, at any rate) than any other.

This book does a fantastic job of explaining the ever-shifting scope of linguistics, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. Even better, it puts the field of linguistics into a larger context, so you can see where the influential thinkers were coming from.

What do linguists think the study of human language should entail? What does a linguist consider important, interesting, relevant, and/or worth examining and studying? The answers to these questions have changed over the years, and sometimes radically so. You'll read a lot, of course, about Chomsky's ideas and theories, and the disagreements he had with many linguists who considered themselves his disciples, but you'll also come away with an appreciation of the influence that 20th-century philosophy (Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, Logical Positivism) had on the field of linguistics, and a realization that the age-old empiricism/rationalism debate is still going on, and is still important, today.

"The Linguistics Wars" is a great read, an excellent history of linguistics, a decent intro to Chomsky, and a good reminder of the importance of philosophy as well. If you're at all interested in linguistics, or curious about what kind of work linguists actually do, or want to know why everybody thinks Chomsky is such a big deal, you'll probably enjoy this book.

Eminently suitable reading if you are embarking on a modern study of the field of linguistics or are writing an essay on the people and personalities involved or just like reading about the history and evolution of a science. Reads like a good novel. There are a few spots where the uninitiated might be intimidated by the technical treatments but they can be skimmed over. One gets a good sense of how, because of Chomsky, a Kuhnian style paradigm shift occured. What's missing perhaps is some insight that transformational grammar found a fertile ground because Chomsky was at MIT which did not have a deeply established linguistics department but did have a bias towards mathematical and notational models.

The author warns you that the personalities, esp. Chomsky, come off a little abrassively. I got a sense of Chomsky as exceptionally brilliant, revolutionary but a man seduced into creating his own orthodoxy - an quite mean about it too. One wonders what might have happened had Chomsky not been dismissive of the study of semantics.

I enjoyed it a lot. Prof. Harris writes extremely well. ;-)

I've spent months looking for a survey of twentieth century linguistics that explains the models and theories as well as the politics behind it all. This is the book. Buy it, enjoy it.