Podcast episode 42: Randy Harris on the Linguistics Wars

History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences

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]