Abstract

This book is a clear, judicious, explanatory, and short analysis of the development of linguistics, particularly in this century. While describing the ups and downs of autonomous linguistics, in its structuralist and various generativist phases, and the humanist, Marxist, and sociological opposition, Newmeyer from time to time makes striking points about the strong influence of national political agendas, as expressed in research money, on the waxing or waning of theoretical orientations in linguistics. Mirroring an older British imperialism, the burgeoning of autonomous linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s was underwritten by a United States government anxious to support a scientific access to societies it wished to enlighten and dominate. Indeed, the end of sumptuous Department of Defense funding for MIT linguistics may even have had a hand in the revolt against the Chomskysan orthodoxy. But Newmeyer forms his intellectual history with enough of a characterization of the theoretical advances, arguments, and resolutions to make it clear that his central judgement is that autonomous linguistics is science and is a viable enterprise.