Syntactic Structures - Criticisms

Criticisms

In his 1964 presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America, American linguist Charles Hockett considered Syntactic Structures one of "only four major breakthroughs in modern linguistics", alongside Sir William Jones's address to the Asiatic Society in 1786, Karl Verner's Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung in 1875 and Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale in 1916. But he rapidly turned into a fierce critic of Chomskyan linguistics. By 1966, Hockett rejected " frame of reference in almost every detail". In his 1968 book The State of the Art, Hockett writes that Chomsky's main fallacy is that he treats language as a formal, well-defined, stable system and proceeds from this idealized abstraction. Hockett believes such an idealization is not possible, claiming that there is no empirical evidence that our language faculty is, in reality, a well-defined underlying system. The sources that give rise to language faculty in humans, e.g. physical genetic transmission and cultural transmission, are themselves ill-defined. In Hockett's view, "we must not promote our more or less standardized by-and-large characterization of the language to the status of a monolithic ideal, nor infer that because we can achieve a fixed characterization some such monolithic ideal exists, in the lap of God or in the brain of each individual speaker." Hockett also decried Chomsky's principle that syntax is completely independent of semantics.

Another long-standing critic of Chomskyan linguistics, the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson, maintains that Chomsky's linguistics is intuition-based and non-empirical, and that it largely owes its good fortune of becoming the dominant theoretical paradigm in the following years to the charisma of Chomsky's intellect. Sampson notes that there are many references in Syntactic Structures to Chomsky's own LSLT in matters regarding the formal underpinnings of Chomsky's approach, but LSLT was not widely available in print for decades. Nevertheless, Sampson's argument runs, Syntactic Structures, albeit "sketchy", derived its "aura of respectability" from LSLT lurking in the background. In turn, the acceptance of Chomsky's future works rested on the success of Syntactic Structures.