Charles Faulkner - Critical Responses - Linguistics Wars

Linguistics Wars

Linguistic Wars arose from the falling out of Noam Chomsky's early students who decided to focus on Chomsky's concept of conceptual deep structure as having a central role in the way the mind assigns meaning to specific language structures. This group of students which included John Robert Ross (Faulkner's professor at Northwestern), developed a school of thought (known as generative semantics) which stood in direct opposition to Chomsky's interpretive semantics school of thought.

Eventually, generative semantics spawned an alternative linguistic paradigm, known as cognitive linguistics, which attempts to correlate the understanding of language together with the biological function of specific neural structures. Whereas generative semanticists function on the premise that the mind has a unique and independent module for language acquisition, cognitive linguists deny this. Instead, they assert that the processing of linguistic phenomena is informed by conceptual deep structures—and more significantly—that the cognitive abilities used to process this data are similar to those used in other non-linguistic tasks. Much of this work is published today under neurolinguistics.

Drawing upon cognitive linguists, NLP views meaning in terms of mental spaces filled with conceptualizations and subconscious metaphors. Furthermore, there is a mutual interplay of influence between language and cognition within the mind, as well as in the environment of the individual.