1986/03/01 by Frederick J. Newmeyer · 41 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Linguistics and Language Studies #Linguistics #Philosophy
paper · doi:10.2307/415597
published in Language 62(1), 1-18 (Linguistic Society of America)
openalex publication_date 1986/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
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.