American Linguistics in Transition

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AbstractAmerican Linguistics in Transition is devoted to a major chapter in the history of linguistics in the United States. From the 1930s to the 1960s a form of structural linguistics was dominant in that country. By the end of the 1960s Chomsky’s generative grammar had to a significant extent eclipsed its structuralist antecedents. The book discusses the rise of structuralism in the 1930s, explaining its successes and its limitations. One chapter is devoted to the interplay between American structuralism and European structuralism. Another deals with the early debate between structuralism and generative grammar, pinpointing what the two approaches shared and how they differed. Other chapters focus on the what generativists did to make their new ideas known, on how their theory was accepted (or not) in Europe, and on the resistance to the new theory by leading structuralists, which continued into the 1980s. The final chapter demonstrates that generative grammarians were not organizationally dominant in the field in the US in the 1970s and 1980s, despite what has often been claimed.