Ideology and Linguistic Theory

by John A. Goldsmith, Geoffrey J. Huck

In The Ideological Structure of Linguistic Theory Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith provide a revisionist account of the development of ideas about semantics in modern theories of language, focusing particularly on Chomsky's very public rift with the Generative Semanticists about the concept of Deep Structure.

Genres: Linguistics, Science, Philosophy, History

196 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1995

About the author

John Anton Goldsmith is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, with appointments in linguistics and computer science. He was educated at Swarthmore College, where he obtained his B.A. in 1972, and at MIT, where he completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics under Morris Halle in 1976. He was on the faculty at the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University, before joining the University of Chicago in 1984. He has also taught at the LSA Linguistic Institutes and has held visiting appointments at McGill, Harvard, and UCSD, among others. In 2007, Goldsmith was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Goldsmith's research ranges from phonology to computational linguistics. His Ph.D thesis introduced autosegmental phonology, which regards phonological phenomena as a collection of parallel tiers with individual segments representing certain features of speech. His recent research deals with unsupervised learning of linguistic structure (particularly exemplified by his Linguistica project, a body of software which attempts to automatically analyze the morphology of a language), as well as in extending computational linguistics algorithms to bioinformatics.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book was a bit like listening to a long story from my grandpa, if my grandpa were a successful linguist. My eyes definitely glazed over in parts of the first two chapters, even though it was on the whole quite educational: for one thing, I finally realised that Jim McCloskey and Jim McCawley are two different dudes! I also appreciated the concrete evidence that interpersonally, Chomsky wasn’t great.

Lakoff’s interview at the end, where he assigns OT-style priorities (“commitments”) to various 70s-era linguists to explain why they all thought each other were fools was pretty cool. Really I wish there were more books like this: a little linguistic theory, a little history, a little big-picture science talk, and a lot of (professionally dressed) gossip about an insular community that I’m tangentially part of.

[Deniz Rudin]

Really remarkably insightful and useful in its typologizing of the aims of different stages of syntactic theory—negotiating some mixture of goals that Huck & Goldsmith call "distributional" (explain the distribution of forms), "mediational" (explain how language relates sound to meaning), and, of course, cognitive. Gives both the sense that a lot of progress has been made on important issues, and that that progress is sometimes directly obscured by what people (mistakenly) see as the deepest and most pressing ideological arguments.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

lol did Chomsky shit in these guy's cornflakes?

Functions as an argument against itself. Represents the loosie goosey state of 'facts' for Right Wingers in the sciences when their ideology is bruised.