The Linguistics Wars

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. ;-)