Linguistics wars

The linguistics wars were extended deputes among American theoretical linguists that occurred mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from a disagreement between Noam Chomsky and several of his associates and students. The debates started in 1967 when linguists Paul Postal, John R. Ross, George Lakoff, and James D. McCawley —self-dubbed the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"^[1]^(p70)—proposed an alternative approach in which the relation between semantics and syntax is viewed differently, which treated deep structures as meaning rather than syntactic objects. While Chomsky and other generative grammarians argued that meaning is driven by an underlying syntax, generative semanticists posited that syntax is shaped by an underlying meaning. This intellectual divergence led to two competing frameworks in generative semantics and interpretive semantics.

Eventually, generative semantics spawned a different linguistic paradigm, known as cognitive linguistics, a linguistic theory that correlates learning of languages to other cognitive abilities such as memorization, perception, and categorization, while descendants of interpretive semantics continue in the guise of formal semantics.

^ Harris, Randy A. (2022) [1993]. The Linguistics Wars (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-199-74033-8.

[Harris2022-1] Harris, Randy A. (2022) [1993]. The Linguistics Wars (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-199-74033-8.

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