Has There Been a ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ in Linguistics?

Abstract

While it was once uncontroversial to refer to a ‘Chomskyan revolution’ in linguistics, a number of commentators have recently questioned whether generativist theory truly represents a revolutionary departure from earlier approaches. This paper defends the view that a Chomskyan revolution has indeed occurred—a revolution which began with the publication of Syntactic structures (1957) and which has had profound effects, both intellectually for the study of language and sociologically for the field of linguistics. Paradoxically, however, the revolutionary success of generative grammarians has not resulted in their achieving ADMINISTRATIVE power in the field—a fact which is both documented and explained.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 76 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.