In this interview, we talk to Randy Harris about the controversies surrounding the generative semantics movement in American linguistics of the 1960s and 70s.

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References for Episode 42

Chomsky, N. (2015/1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax (50th Anniversary edition.). The MIT Press.

Harris, R. A. (2021/1993). The linguistics wars: Noam Chomsky, George Lakoff, and the battle over Deep Structure (2nd ed.). Oxford.

Huck, G. J., & Goldsmith, J. A. (1995). Ideology and linguistic theory: Noam Chomsky and the deep structure debates. Routledge.

Katz, J. J., & Postal, P. M. (1964). An integrated theory of linguistic descriptions. M.I.T. Press.

McCawley, J. D. (1980). Linguistic theory in America: The first quarter-century of transformational generative grammar, by Frederick J. Newmeyer (Book Review). Linguistics, 18(9), 911-930.

Newmeyer, F. J. (1986/1980). Linguistic theory in America: The first quarter-century of transformational generative grammar (2nd ed.). Academic Press.

Postal, P. M. (1972). The best theory. In S. Peters (Ed.), Goals of linguistic theory. Prentice-Hall.

Postal, P. M. (1988). Topic…Comment: Advances in linguistic rhetoric. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 6(1), 129–137.

Transcript by Luca Dinu

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, [00:14] online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:17] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:21] Today we’re talking to Randy Harris, [00:24] who is Professor of both English Language and Literature and Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. [00:32] Among other things, Randy is the author of The Linguistics Wars, [00:37] the classic account of the generative semantics controversy that engulfed generative linguistics in the 1960s and ’70s. [00:45] A second edition of Randy’s book came out in 2021, and I’ve been wanting to talk to him about it since then, [00:52] but as a history podcast, we are by definition behind the times, [00:57] so it’s only appropriate that we’re only getting to his book now. [01:01] So, Randy, can you tell us, what were the linguistics wars? [01:05] Who were the chief combatants, and what were they fighting about? [01:09]

RH: Well, first, thanks for inviting me on. I’m a big fan of the podcast. [01:13] It’s a really important and interesting podcast about the history of linguistics, [01:18] and I’m also a fan of your work, your Ogden book, Language and Meaning. [01:22] It is really, really valuable, and I’m looking forward to the new one that you’ve got coming out on the history of modern linguistics. [01:30] So, maybe the best way to start is just to talk about how I entered the project in the first place. [01:35] So, I was a PhD student, and I just discovered a field called rhetoric. [01:41] My other degrees were in literature and linguistics before I got there, [01:46] and I was casting around. I’d originally gone to do communication theory, [01:50] but it turned out that the department wasn’t as strong in that as I thought, [01:54] and they had a really good rhetorician, and he was doing something called rhetoric of science, [01:59] which is basically the study of scientific argumentation. [02:03] I started reading in that field quite a bit and studying under him, Michael Halloran, [02:08] and then when it came time to write a dissertation, I started casting around for scientific episodes. [02:14] One of the themes of rhetoric of science at that point was mostly looking at controversies, [02:19] looking at how scientific disputes get resolved or fail to get resolved through warring camps. [02:25] I read Fritz Newmeyer’s book, Linguistic Theory in America, [02:29] and one of the key chapters is about this group called the generative semanticists and Chomsky coming at odds with each other, [02:39] but I’d also read a review of the book by James McCawley, [02:42] who was one of the people associated with the linguistics wars on the generative semanticists’ side, [02:47] and it was fairly polite, but said that basically Newmeyer’s book didn’t tell the whole story. [02:53] So I thought, “Well, I’d look into this a bit,” and I wrote basically all of the major players. [02:58] So I wrote Chomsky, of course, and the major players on the generative semanticists’ side were Paul Postal, [03:06] who was a colleague of Chomsky’s just before that, George Lakoff, John Robert Ross (Haj Ross), [03:13] and Ray Jackendoff, who was aligned with Chomsky in this dispute, [03:17] but also a lot of people around the dispute [03:21] — Jerrold Katz, Jerry Fodor, Thomas Bever, Arnold Zwicky, Jay Keyser, Robert Lees, Morris Halle, Jerry Sadock, Howard Lasnik, [03:30] just everybody who had seemed to have something to say about that dispute and about the theories around them — [03:37] and I got just an overwhelming response. [03:40] Everybody wanted to talk about it. [03:43] I can’t remember the exact order in which it happened, whether it was a response to a letter that invited me to call or a phone call as a response to my initial letter to Lakoff, [03:52] but Lakoff and I were on the phone for like an hour and a half one night, [03:56] him just going through what everything was all about. [03:59] So this was 20 years after the dispute, more or less, and everybody was still wanting to talk about it. [04:06] There were still hurt feelings and incensed attitudes and so forth, [04:10] and I was coming at it from a completely different discipline and a PhD student, [04:16] not anybody really in the field, and all of them wanted to talk to me. [04:20] So it grew into a kind of oral history project. [04:22] I travelled around and interviewed them all. [04:25] I ended up with like 500-some-odd pages of transcripts of interviews. [04:29] I met Lakoff in a bar in Cambridge. I talked to Chomsky for hours in his office. [04:35] I went to the University of Chicago, and one of the sociological centre points of the generative semanticist side was the University of Chicago, [04:42] especially all of the conferences and publications out of the Chicago Linguistic Society, [04:47] and talked to McCawley and Sadock and so forth there. [04:50] So everybody wanted to talk about it. [04:52] It was a really interesting story. [04:54] What was it? I’ll give you the scientific development story first. [04:58] So Noam Chomsky and his collaborators, most prominently Paul Postal and Gerald Katz, [05:06] developed a theory coalesced in the book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965 [05:12] that had this central notion of deep structure. [05:16] The model itself was structured as a process model where you generate sentences, [05:22] and it was a sentence grammar, not an utterance grammar. [05:25] All of the proponents denied that it was a process. [05:28] They just talked about it as an abstract model of linguistic knowledge in some way, [05:32] but it was shaped as a process model in which you had a set of syntactic rules, [05:37] phrase structure rules, that generated a syntactic structure [05:41] and a bag of words, a dictionary, a lexicon, that then populated the structure. [05:48] And then what you got was the deep structure, which wasn’t what we speak with [05:55] or write with, but an underlying representation that somehow crystallized [06:00] essential aspects of how we speak, one of them being semantic. [06:05] So a paradigm case would be the passive transformation. [06:09] The phrase structure rules and lexicon give you something like [06:13] “John walked the dog,” and that might percolate through with a few adjustments [06:18] in terms of morphology and then percolate through to the surface structure, [06:22] which was a much closer representation to how we talked, [06:25] or it might go through a passive transformation and come out as [06:28] “The dog was walked by John.” [06:31] The arguments around that focused on the fact that both “John walked the dog” [06:36] and “The dog was walked by John” have essentially the same semantics, [06:40] the same role, the same walker and walkee, agent and patient. [06:45] And so the claim developed that transformations don’t change meaning, [06:51] that meaning resides in the deep structure. [06:55] That’s the 1965 Aspects case. [06:58] So several linguists — most notably Lakoff, Ross, and Postal — [07:06] started enriching the semantics of deep structure, [07:10] making it more and more semantically responsible until it effectively became, [07:15] for the generative semanticist, the semantic representation. [07:18] The Aspects model had a set of semantic interpretation rules that looked [07:23] at the deep structure and found out what the meaning was, [07:26] but the generative semanticists said that the semantic representation was deep structure, effectively. [07:31]

JMc: So what exactly is a semantic representation in this model? [07:34] Is it propositional semantics only, or does it include even details of what we would now consider pragmatics? [07:42]

RH: Well, still in the immediate aftermath of Aspects, just propositional semantics entirely, [07:49] but the argument started to coalesce around dismantling deep structure. [07:54] So one set of arguments around the verb “kill,” for instance. [07:58] “Kill” could be seen as “cause to die.” [08:01] “Cause to die” could be seen as… or “die” could be seen as “not alive,” [08:05] and so “kill” could be seen as “cause to be not alive.” [08:10] And then in the generative semanticist approach, [08:13] these were assembled into the surface structure, assembled in bits and pieces. [08:19] So things like “cause,” “not,” “alive,” were all semantic primitives, [08:25] semantic predicates in and of themselves that got assembled [08:27] into the words that we spoke with. [08:30] And if that’s the case, you can’t have a level of deep structure that inherits words. [08:36] It’s building words. [08:38]

JMc: And can I just quickly ask, what was the nature of these semantic primitives? [08:42] Are they like what Wierzbicka was talking about in the ’70s? [08:47]

RH: Yes, very close, yeah. [08:49] In fact, Wierzbicka was associated with the early generative semanticists as well. [08:53] I think she visited MIT when this stuff was starting to develop and sort of mutually influenced at that point. [09:01] But there were also some quite arcane arguments around the level of deep structure [09:06] that led to lots of vituperation. [09:08] OK, still sticking with the scientific story, Chomsky apparently thought this was wrong, [09:15] that the deep structure shouldn’t be deeper, but in fact should be shallower, [09:21] and he built some arguments around things like nominalizations. [09:24] So the Aspects theory would relate a sentence like, [09:28] “Russia destroyed Mariupol” with the noun phrase, [09:32] “Russia’s destruction of Mariupol.” [09:35] So Chomsky wanted to put this process into the lexicon. [09:39] So transformations had been used to build nominalizations out of verbs, for instance. [09:44] So his approach was to weaken transformations, [09:48] whereas the generative semanticists wanted to strengthen them, [09:52] undercut their lexical powers like the assembly into “kill” from “cause to be not alive,” [09:59] retrench the semantic interpretation rules, enrich the semantics of the surface structure. [10:04] So, wholly opposed to the generative semanticists’ move to take semantics deeper and deeper. [10:10] So at this point in, say, 1967, ’68, you’ve got two fairly distinct theories: [10:18] generative semantics (Lakoff, Ross, McCawley, Postal, also Robin Lakoff), [10:25] and interpretive semantics (Chomsky, mostly Chomsky, also Ray Jackendoff) [10:31] building a lot of arguments around semantic interpretation rules [10:34] and X-bar syntax, which was introduced at this point also to, in part, undermine transformations like the nominalization transformation, and Ray Dougherty and others. [10:45] So that’s the scientific story. [10:47] Generative semantics seemed to be taking charge, leading the field, [10:53] but then Chomsky’s retrenchments and developments ascended, [10:58] and the kind of conventional version, especially at the time, [11:01] was that Chomsky and interpretive semantics had simply won the argument, [11:06] and linguistics should favour this kind of interpretive grammar that Chomsky was advocating. [11:14] The label he was giving it at the time was “Extended Standard Theory,” [11:17] which was in a way sort of accurate, but also a kind of nifty rhetorical move, [11:23] because he rebranded the Aspects theory as the standard theory, [11:27] and generative semantics as one deviation of it, [11:30] the wrong-headed deviation of it, [11:32] and the Extended Standard Theory as a way of taking it in the right direction. [11:35] So, again, that’s just the basic scientific story. [11:38] The sociological and rhetorical story is that Ross, and especially Lakoff, were deliberately outpacing Chomsky [11:48] and trying to dominate the theory by taking it in a given direction, [11:54] and, again, that direction was perceived to be fairly popular, [11:57] fairly responsible at the time. [11:59] Chomsky apparently was allergic to Lakoff, [12:03] just really disliked him intensely. [12:06] Again, this is based on this kind of quasi-oral history project, [12:10] everybody talking about the way things flared up. [12:14] Chomsky attacked Lakoff in his class, Lakoff attacked Chomsky in his classes at Harvard, [12:21] but the real centre point of the dispute early on was in Chomsky’s classes at MIT. [12:28] Lakoff attended them, not a student. [12:30] Ross attended them, not really a student any longer either. [12:34] He was Chomsky’s student, but at that point he wasn’t signing up for courses. [12:38] Robin Lakoff attended them, who was a student at Harvard at the time. [12:43] Jackendoff and Daugherty were there. They were direct students. [12:46] It’s not unusual, by the way, for Chomsky’s classes to be attended by lots of people who aren’t his students. [12:53] His syntax classes were quite famous, and people would travel in from all over the place to take his syntax classes. [12:59] Howard Lasnik was telling me [13:01] he had kept an apartment in Cambridge, teaching in Connecticut, [13:05] kept an apartment just so he could go back and attend the lectures. [13:08] MIT would schedule Chomsky’s classes on the basis of the enrolment, so just a standard kind of classroom, [13:15] and it turned into the Black Hole of Calcutta, [13:18] with everybody lining the walls, and sort of standing room only. [13:21] And so they, after that, MIT started scheduling his courses in lecture halls and stuff. [13:25] In any case, it’s not unusual for people not directly studying under Chomsky to be there, [13:30] but the classes were reputed to be really cantankerous. [13:34] From Lakoff’s perspective, Chomsky would misrepresent the generative semanticists’ proposals [13:40] and distort them, and then he would politely stand up and oppose them, [13:44] but Chomsky would shut him down, Jackendoff would weigh in, [13:48] and they were just kind of remembered as very cantankerous, [13:51] mostly with Lakoff on one side and Chomsky on the other, [13:55] but everybody else weighing in in various ways, and it fanned out from there. [13:59] So it really took over the discipline for seven, eight, ten years or so, [14:04] affecting peer reviews and publication and hiring and conferences. [14:11] There was a famous plenary session at the LSA where Jackendoff and Lakoff [14:16] were hurling obscenities at each other, and… [14:18] So, very, very cantankerous, and took over the entire discipline of linguistics, more or less, [14:25] in North America in particular, for about ten years. [14:28]

JMc: But does that mean that all of linguistics in North America was bound up with the generative school by this stage? [14:34]

RH: No, not all, but the bulk of it, for sure, [14:38] and that, in part, is because of how popular Chomsky’s work was [14:43] from Syntactic Structures on to Aspects. [14:46] So linguistics expanded really dramatically in the ’60s and ’70s, [14:50] lots of money pouring into it, lots of departments starting up and expanding [14:55] and so forth on the basis of popularity of Chomsky’s theories. [14:58] And so, overwhelmingly, it was the generative program that was being developed in most places. [15:05] There were certainly lots of existing linguistic programs before that, [15:09] but even those ones were generally dominated by generative approaches. [15:14]

JMc: Are the linguistics wars interesting to anyone who isn’t a linguist? [15:18] I mean, apart from being an example of the rhetoric of science, is there any interest that we can draw from them? [15:25] I mean, the central actors, Chomsky and Lakoff, and especially Chomsky, are, of course, quite famous [15:30] for the roles they’ve played outside disciplinary linguistics, [15:34] so for their participation in and commentary on political discourse. [15:38] But do these arguments over deep structure have any broader repercussions? [15:43] Are they anything more than inconsequential theoretical debates within one branch of American linguistics? [15:51]

RH: Now, in some sense, no, [15:53] certainly not the debates around deep structure that started everything off. [15:58] So a typical argument around deep structure, for instance, [16:01] so, again, transformations were held not to change meaning, [16:07] and that was a position that was developed most directly by Paul Postal [16:12] and Jerrold Katz, so it was called the Katz-Postal Principle. [16:16] So there were lots of arguments around the Katz-Postal Principle about deep structure. [16:19] One of the most famous is around sentences like, “Everyone in Canada speaks two languages,” [16:26] and “Two languages are spoken by everyone in Canada.” [16:30] That looks like a transformation has changed meaning, [16:33] because it’s either that at least two languages are spoken by everybody, [16:37] versus there are two languages that are spoken by everybody. [16:41] There was an attempt to kind of save the phenomena by saying, [16:44] well, that both interpretations are latent, both meanings are latent, [16:48] and it’s only context that highlights one. [16:51] So that was the kind of generative semantics approach to kind of save the Katz-Postal Principle, [16:56] where on the interpretive semantics side, it was proof that transformations did change meaning, [17:00] so the Katz-Postal Principle had to be rejected, [17:03] and if you reject the Katz-Postal Principle, then you can’t have a deep layer of semantics, [17:07] because the transformations are going to rearrange things, and that destroys generative semantics. [17:12] What happened out of that argument was basically people stopped talking about it, and the passive transformation was abandoned. [17:18] So the arguments around deep structure, not so much, [17:21] but they kind of sponsored a divergence that took much, much larger dimensions. [17:28] So in terms of the substance of the debate, [17:33] one of the most immediate consequences is that transformations lost their appeal and eventually just went away. [17:40] They were the major mechanism of linguistics for about 15 years, [17:44] and then because of this debate, [17:47] people started developing all kinds of alternative grammars, [17:49] like Lexical Functional Grammar and Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, [17:53] Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and so forth. [17:55] Other things like Relational Grammar and Word Grammar all kind of developed as alternatives to a transformationally driven grammar, [18:04] and eventually even Chomsky abandoned transformation. [18:07] So it reshaped linguistics really substantially, even though it seemed to start on a quite minor technical matter. [18:13] But it also enveloped a lot of quite a bit more substantial issues as the debate went on. [18:18] So the nature of cognition with respect to language. [18:22] The generative position was, there’s a universal grammar, [18:26] a language acquisition device, [18:28] some kind of genetically wired module [18:31] that just needs a little bit of exposure to language to grow a language. [18:36] It was literally one of the terms that Chomsky used about how language developed was, it just grew in the same way that an Adam’s apple will grow, or… [18:45] His argument was that humans grow arms and doves grow wings [18:48] because of genetic predispositions in the same way humans grow a language. [18:53] So all more or less hardwired, whereas arguments against Chomsky began to align against that position, this innate mechanism, [19:03] and notions of general-purpose cognition, [19:06] categorization, the influence of analogy and correlation, [19:10] pattern biases, embodiment, force dynamics, [19:14] the role of attention and memory, context. [19:17] All of those things began to develop in opposition to Chomsky and developed into full-fledged and interesting theories of linguistics, [19:27] the nature of meaning and representation. [19:30] So on the transformational grammar side, the Chomskyan side, [19:34] meaning was effectively propositional, compositional, [19:39] dictionary kind of meaning where you inserted words into propositions [19:43] and had rules that told you what those propositions meant, [19:46] versus an encyclopedic kind of sense of meaning [19:49] that any given use of a word calls upon a frame of knowledge around the use of that word. [19:55] So non-compositionality in terms of the representation of meaning, [20:00] even the representation of syntactic meaning, [20:04] which had traditionally been basically a kind of item-and-arrangement program [20:08] where you had rules that aligned words which sponsored propositions and so forth, [20:14] the whole notion of the relevance of rules versus kind of a symbolic attraction amongst terms. [20:20] So a lot of very substantial territory was covered that sort of developed out of that initial debate around deep structure. [20:29]

JMc: So if we turn specifically to your book, [20:32] what changes have you made between the first edition and this new edition, [20:37] and why did you think that a new edition was necessary? [20:41]

RH: Well, Oxford asked for a new edition. [20:44] The first one was quite popular, and I think, frankly, [20:48] although it was never articulated, I think, frankly, [20:51] there was also a sense that Chomsky is a major figure [20:55] who’s not going to be around forever, and when he passes, [20:59] there’s going to be a lot of attention paid to his work, [21:01] and Oxford, I think, wanted to be prepared by having this book about him [21:06] that had sold and got reviewed quite well in a new edition. [21:11] But for my purposes, it just struck me as an unfinished story. [21:16] I guess all history is unfinished. [21:18] But so the first book ends on two sort of notes. [21:20] One, the right of salvage, a really good term that Postal coined [21:25] in an interesting article called “The Rhetoric of Linguistics,” [21:28] “rhetoric” being used there as a pejorative, [21:30] not a way that a rhetorician would use it as a study of argumentation and persuasion, but still a really fun and insightful article. [21:37] So it ends on these two notes: the right of salvage and the greening of linguistics. [21:42] The right of salvage was mostly about Chomsky’s program adopting many, many positions that were either proposed or arose directly out of the work by generative semanticists. [21:53] So logical form, for instance, was a semantic representation that was developed by McCawley and Lakoff mostly, [22:01] and it starts to play a much bigger role in Chomsky’s linguistics after this. [22:06] Even such things as a logical form rule of quantifier raising [22:10] is basically an inversion of a rule of Lakoff’s called quantifier lowering. [22:16] So it’s basically a mirror image. [22:19] Also, the entire framework of Chomsky’s approach, [22:23] this is when the minimalist program with its basic property gets proposed, [22:28] which is effectively that grammar connects meaning and an output of some kind, [22:34] which is basically the model of generative semantics, the model that Postal in one of his papers called Homogeneous I. [22:40] So it’s basically a homogeneous series of transformations that take you from meaning to articulation. [22:47] Also, he abandoned deep structure eventually. [22:50] He abandoned transformations. [22:52] He adopted many of the claims. And when I say “he,” I mean his program. [22:56] So there was a type of rule that the generative semanticists proposed called global rules. [23:02] What global rules did, again, was a way of kind of saving the Katz-Postal Principle by being able to sort of give the semantic representation a kind of peek into the transformational cycle in certain sorts of ways. [23:15] And it kind of maintained the power of transformations that the Chomskyans were attempting to reduce, [23:21] and they were attacked really, really vociferously. [23:24] This is one of the clearest roles of obvious rhetoric in the debate, [23:29] in that virtually all the sins of generative semantics were hung around this notion of globality, [23:33] which was claimed to make the grammar and transformation in particular much, much more powerful when they needed to be restricted. [23:41] But Chomsky and the Chomskyans adopted many of these global proposals without calling them global proposals. [23:48] They attacked globality as a rhetorical phenomenon, [23:51] but still salvaged many of the developments in that line of argumentation. [23:56] So the basic structure of the Minimalist Program [23:59] — logical form, aspects of globality, the abandonment of deep structure, the abandonment of transformations — [24:05] all virtually without acknowledgment, or just very minimal acknowledgment [24:10] — things that came out of generative semantics. [24:12] I mean, the… Generative semantics began by arguing for the abolishment of deep structure. [24:17] Chomsky abandons deep structure and doesn’t even reference these arguments, just kind of sets it aside. [24:24] So that’s the right of salvage, the fact that much of the technical machinery of generative semantics lived on, [24:33] but lived on in Chomsky’s program. [24:36] The greening of linguistics is the inverse direction, the opening up of linguistics, [24:41] as opposed to the kind of retrenching of Chomskyan positions [24:45] — so, a kind of cracking of the Chomskyan hegemony. [24:49] I overstated that, I think, considerably in the first book, but… [24:52] So the greening of linguistics is the move away from the Chomskyan hegemony. [24:57] So the development of pragmatics, which you mentioned, that became really instrumental in generative semantics. [25:02] Many of the earliest pragmatic linguists came directly out of generative semantics. [25:08] The welcoming of functional and sociolinguistic argumentation, [25:12] which had been pretty much banned from the generative program as inconsequential, not fundamental to linguistics, [25:19] especially not fundamental to competence, linguistic knowledge, [25:23] which the Chomskyans focused on. [25:26] Evidence from psycholinguistics became considerably more important. [25:30] The generativist program tended to cherry-pick psycholinguistic argumentation. [25:35] So if it supported their positions, they would cite it, and if it didn’t support their positions, they would ignore it or denounce it, [25:41] and their positions might change in something that they endorsed, [25:45] they would then reject a little bit later on. [25:48] Whereas in this generative semantics outflow, the linguists that were moving in that direction would allow psycholinguistic arguments to drive their linguistic theories, [25:59] as opposed to only support it if they could manage to cherry-pick it in the right way. [26:03] Evidence from corpus studies, it was positively discouraged and scorned in the Chomskyan program, [26:10] but now evidence from corpus linguistics became important. [26:13] So all of that is the end of the story in the first edition of Linguistic Wars. [26:17] And what I wanted to do, but it just sort of caps it off as, this is a… The greening of linguistics is a sort of direction that’s opening up without any kind of consolidation, really. [26:28] But what I wanted to do was tell the story of how it did consolidate [26:33] into things like construction grammar, and frame semantics, and cognitive linguistics generally, [26:40] and also follow up the generativist story through a minimalism, [26:45] the FOXP2 story that looked like it supported universal grammar for a while, [26:49] looked like there was a grammar gene, and that got a lot of press. [26:54] The Daniel Everett Pirahã story that looked like it undermined recursion, [26:59] which is pretty much all that was left of the Chomskyans’ notion of universal grammar by the early 2000s. [27:06] And then, again, to follow up the development of frame semantics, construction grammar, cognitive linguistics more generally. [27:15] I also discounted Lakoff’s role, I think, Lakoff’s subsequent role, and I wanted to kind of restore that in a sense. [27:22] I presented Lakoff mostly as a kind of gadfly with a lot of intellectual insights, but no coherent program at all, [27:31] and that comes pretty directly out of Newmeyer’s Linguistic Theory in America. [27:36] And that’s, I think, pretty much how he looked in the early ’90s when I wrote Linguistics Wars, [27:43] but Lakoff, in correspondence and discussions with me, insisted that he was a much more influential linguist than I took him to be at the time. [27:51] And certainly, history has proved him right. [27:53] The cognitive linguistics program around things like image schema, [27:57] so-called conceptual metaphor theory, things of that sort, [28:00] Lakoff has been incredibly influential in. [28:03] So I wanted to acknowledge his role in the subsequent development of the field. [28:07] Also, Robin Lakoff, by the way. My treatment of her in the first edition is continuing the standard misogynist approach of downplaying the role of female scholars, [28:18] and in a sense, I kind of inherited it, but I should have known better. [28:22] And again, that’s something that George Lakoff insisted on in our correspondence, [28:26] especially after the dissertation that the book was developed on, [28:29] that I just didn’t give her enough credit. [28:31] But I continued not to give her enough credit in the first book. [28:34] I wanted to revisit that and give her more credit, especially on the influence of the field afterwards. [28:41] So I follow up the story further, and I attend to some of the players in more detail than I did initially. [28:48]

JMc: What changes do you think there’d be if there was a third edition in another 30 years? [28:54]

RH: Well, I’d have to look back in 30 years, right? [28:56] I don’t think I would have predicted — in fact, I didn’t predict — the kind of consolidation of cognitive linguistics in the first edition that transpired. [29:03] There were hints of it, but I thought it was mostly Langacker going to sort of have an alternate theory that was going to grow. [29:14] And Langacker certainly had been important, [29:17] but I wouldn’t have… I didn’t predict the kind of developments that followed. [29:22]

JMc: Or maybe I could put the question like this. [29:25] A lot of the central actors are still alive and more or less active, although, as you mentioned, people are starting to disappear. [29:35] Do you think that it’s still all too recent for us to really look back on this episode insightfully, [29:42] or do you think that when dusk descends and the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings and takes flight [29:48] that we’ll have a better view of what actually took place, what the actual significance of this episode is? [29:55]

RH: I guess at some point, history ends and we can maybe look back. [30:00] But no, I don’t think this moment doesn’t bring us a lot of insight into what came out of that dispute. [30:07] Again, I think a lot of important developments in linguistics of the 21st century, the shape it has, comes out of that debate, [30:15] so I think we can see what the effects have been. [30:18] And whether or not they continue or branch off in another direction, I wouldn’t want to speculate. [30:26]

JMc: OK, great. Well, thanks very much for answering those questions. [30:30]

RH: Thanks again for having me. It was fun. Again, I love the podcast. Thanks. [30:35]

Poetry is Bread Podcast Episode 23 with Poet Terrance Hayes