What this guy said: 

...and while I'm bookmarking things that I might write about more at a future date, I should include this as well: 

Noam Chomsky Gives His Take On Jeffrey Epstein (2020 New Interview)

(I had actually been intending to post about this weeks ago, but then while researching the topic, I got distracted when I figured out the podcast I was listening to was actually AI generated.)

Part of me wants to condemn Noam Chomsky for his association with Epstein.  (This is why you should never have heroes!)

Part of me wants to excuse Noam Chomsky.  (Chomsky is 97 years old.  Surely he's not still interested in sex at his age.  His relationship with Epstein must be innocent.)

And while I'm still sorting that all out in my mind, deciding whether I want to condemn or excuse Chomsky, I guess I'll just stay quite for the moment. 

I was scrolling through Facebook, and I was surprised to see this ad.  I had to pinch myself to make sure it was real.

Okay, there's a good joke in here somewhere, right? But what's the perfect quip to caption this? pic.twitter.com/UXBitETTKU

— Joel Swagman (@JoelswagmanJoel) November 22, 2023

I'm thinking something long the lines of consumer culture: https://t.co/LHWL9fYCPG

— Joel Swagman (@JoelswagmanJoel) November 22, 2023

Or on second thought, maybe the ad is the joke. Maybe Masterclass is fully aware of the irony of putting Chomsky's face on a Black Friday sale, and they're just trolling us. What do you think?

— Joel Swagman (@JoelswagmanJoel) November 22, 2023

The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff and the Battle Over Deep Structure by Randy Allen Harris: Second Edition: Book Review

(Book Reviews--Linguistics, Rereads)

[This is a reread of sorts.  I read the first edition, and reviewed it on this blog on June 14, 2021.   The second edition is actually a lot different than the first edition in many places, but in other places similar to the first edition.  So sometimes this felt like a reread, sometimes it felt like a completely new book.]

On My Shelves: December 11, 2022

Started: March 27, 2023

Finished: June 18, 2023

The Linguistics Wars: Second Edition: Book Review

My Reviews of related stuff:

* Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause: https://youtu.be/jq-6N3qnqdg

* Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in our Times: https://youtu.be/xgNMqn1pqzM

* The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker: https://youtu.be/yZh25tJ7b9s

* Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction by V.J. Cook and Mark Newson: https://youtu.be/PG8OYXT1onE

* The Lexical Approach by Michael Lewis: https://youtu.be/aZPjbdDeUWQ

* The first edition of The Linguistics Wars: https://youtu.be/PG8OYXT1onE

Commonplace Book:

* p.138: When Linguistic Discussions Get Unnecessarily Emotional

Weekly Reading Vlogs:

April 2, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.i-xvi, p.1-36

April 9, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.36-80

April 16, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.80-104

April 23, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.104-106

April 30, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.106-158

May 7, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.158-184 

May 14, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.184-202

May 21, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.202-246

May 28, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.246-270

June 4, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.270-334

June 11, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.334-392

June 18, 2023 The Linguistics Wars p.392-421

Playlist for the second edition HERE: 

Playlist for both editions HERE: 

Addendum

There's a movie of the Linguistics Wars, sort of. https://t.co/Uti4nrHokw

— randy allen harris (@profraha) June 20, 2023

It is unbelievable how sharp Chomsky still is at 92 years old!  

Noam Chomsky on Consciousness, Sam Harris, Husserl, and Kripkenstein

The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris

(Book Review)

Started: May 7, 2021
Finished: June 1, 2021

Summary

This is the story of what happens when linguists quarrel.  It tells the story of two conflicts: The first is the Chomskyan Revolution that occurred in linguistics in the late 1950s.  The second is the civil war within that revolution in the late 1960s, when the younger generation of linguists wanted to push Chomsky’s model further than Chomsky was willing.
The book is intended to be partly a cultural history, partly a popular science.  I found the narrative parts of the book fascinating. (But then, I’m biased--I’ve long been fascinated by the enigmatic Noam Chomsky.)  The technical linguistic parts of the book, however, are a bit more difficult to get through, especially in the later chapters, at least for a non-specialist reader like myself.  So I can’t claim to have understood the book entirely, but I was very interested in the parts of the book that I did understand. (149 words)

[That's me attempting to be concise.  If you want my usual long-winded version, continue on to The Full Review]

The Full Review

Why I Read This Book/ My History With This Book
This book was recommended by my sister.
In 2017, I was back in the States on a visit, and I was reading The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe, which, (among other ramblings) is an account of the clash between linguists Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett.
I got to chatting about that book with my sister.  My sister, who has studied linguistics extensively, had never heard of Tom Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech.  (Which somewhat surprised me because I remembered the book had made quite a stir on the various linguistic related blogs that I was following at the time (*1).  But perhaps it's an indication of how little serious academics where paying attention to Tom Wolfe's silly little book.)

But, on the subject of Noam Chomsky and vicious infighting in the linguistics department, my sister had another book to recommend to me: The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris.

This is, as my sister explained to me, a book about the fighting between Noam Chomsky and other linguists during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I knew nothing about it, except that I thought I vaguely remember hearing about this controversy from a New Yorker profile I once read on Chomsky.
I've just searched for that article now, and upon re-reading it, I'm now sure this was indeed where I had first heard of the issue. The New Yorker 2003: The Devil’s Accountant By Larissa MacFarquhar. 

 To quote from some snippets of it:

...Chomsky has fought many battles over the years, political and linguistic, but perhaps the most ferocious was the fight in the late sixties and early seventies that became known as the linguistics wars...

...In 1966, Chomsky went on sabbatical to Berkeley for a year, and, without his gravitational presence, this movement, which was later known as “generative semantics,” flourished....

...They were only a little younger than Chomsky, but they were from a different generation, the sixties counterculture...

...In 1967, Chomsky came back from Berkeley and immediately went on the attack. The generative semanticists found the conflict very upsetting: Chomsky was their hero, and here he was, seemingly destroying their theory for the sake of it. He seemed to them to be fighting dirty, purposely misunderstanding their arguments. Chomsky, of course, denied that he was doing any such thing—he felt he was just correcting error, as usual. The situation was too emotional to be an ordinary academic disagreement, and soon it grew nasty... (*2)

So, with my curiosity piqued, I went to the bookstore to order a copy of the book.  
This book was published in 1993, but it's still in print.  It's the type of specialized book that isn't on the shelves of a normal bookstore, but it can be special ordered easily enough.  It did cost me $50, which was rather expensive for a softcover book this size.  (I suspect this book is commonly used as required reading in linguistic courses, which is probably why its so expensive--the publishers know they can charge more for textbooks.)  The bookstore employee, I recall, was upset that I was paying so much money for a book, and grumbled about it as he put in my order.  But I didn't particularly begrudge the money.  I'm a slow enough reader that I knew I was going to get hours of reading out of a book like this--when you think about it on a per hour basis, $50 isn't so bad.

When the book arrived, I could tell just by flipping through it that it was going to be some fairly technical reading.  The pages of the book were filled with linguistic diagrams and sentence trees.

p.92-93

I was, at the time, trying to make my way through Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction , and I figured I would finish that book first, so that I would have some background in the general theory first before I read about the arguments surrounding the theory.
Well, it ended up taking me forever to get through Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction (as I detailed in my review).  During which time, The Linguistics Wars sat unread on my shelf.  But I finally finished Chomsky's Universal Grammar in May, and then I could move on to The Linguistics Wars. (*3)

And here I am with the review.

The Review
Style, Focus, and General Readability

This is a book on the history of linguistics.  As such, it is in part a linguistics textbook, and in part a narrative story.
The parts of this book which I found so fascinating were the narrative drama: the clash of personalities, the descriptions of drama in academia, and the political aspects of it all.  (Because this all took place in the late 60s and 70s, the Vietnam War and counterculture were influencing everything that went on.)  These are the parts of the book that stuck in my memory, and which I am inclined to gush on and on about now that I'm finished with the book.

However, this book is at the same time a linguistics textbook.  Whole chapters are devoted to describing various linguistic theories (chapters on Chomsky's Deep Structure, or the Generative Semantics model, for example).
So, the ideal reader of this book has to be ready to take on both the narrative and the linguistic theory.
In the Preface, Randy Allen Harris says that his intent is to write a popular science for both the linguist and the lay person:

This book--a "popular science" look at linguistics by way of narrating an influential dispute in the sixties and seventies--attempts to clarify what linguists do, why they do it, and why everyone else should care about what they do.
My hope is that linguists will find this book useful, since many of them have a shaky or partisan view of their own recent history, but my greater hope is that non-linguists will find an entertaining and informative account of the science of our most profound and pervasive human attribute, language. (vii)

And indeed, it is obvious that Harris intends this book to be something else than a dry academic textbook.  The book is infused with jokes. (A typical example: When talking about how Herbert Spencer criticizes the science of linguistics, Harris writes "But the attitude Spencer displays--something we might call linguiphobia if that term didn't conjure up a fear of certain sexual practices or pasta cuts--has not abated"  (p.vii)).  
At the same time, however, Harris's range of vocabulary reads like someone who has spent a lot of time in academia.  He (mostly) avoids using specialist technical terms, but he does use an academic vocabulary that assumes a well-read audience.  (I had to check the dictionary a few times while reading this book.)

And, despite Harris's intent to target non-linguists, I have to admit I found the linguistic side of this book hard going at times.
The beginning of the book was well written.  In the opening chapters, I thought Harris did a good job of holding the hand of the reader, and walking them through all the linguistic knowledge that they would need to know in order to understand the narrative.  
In fact, if anything, the opening chapters of this book are almost a little bit too eager to avoid getting bogged down in the technical linguistic details.  Harris talks about what a big deal it was when Chomsky and his collaborator Halle devastated the Bloomfieldian model by attacking the concept of the phoneme in 1959, but he never describes how Chomsky and Halle disproved the phoneme--he just says that Halle presented a paper which disproved the phoneme (somehow) and that this was a really big deal at the time.  Presumably Harris was afraid of overwhelming his reader with too much technical detail, but I thought this was a section where a little bit more detail was needed--just a brief summary of the linguistic argument would have been nice, so that the reader can have a rough idea of what Chomsky and Halle were doing.

However, even though the book starts out well, the commitment to keep the linguistics simple and accessible to non-specialists becomes less and less true the further into the book you read.
By Chapter 5 (Generative Semantics: The Model) I started to notice there were a few paragraphs here and there that I didn't understand.  It didn't stop me from understanding the chapter as a whole--I just kept reading, and pretty soon I would get to a part that I could understand again, but it was a sign of a problem which would get worse.
By Chapter 7 (The Vicissitudes of War), which describes all the arguments going back and forth between the two groups, I had to admit to myself that I was understanding almost none of the linguistic arguments.  I could still follow the narrative--i.e. I still knew who was upset at who--but I couldn't follow the actual linguistic arguments that were being advanced.
Now, whether this is the fault of the book, or whether this is the fault of my own limited intellect is not for me to judge.
So, I went to the review section at Amazon.com and Goodreads to see what other people were saying about the book.  I was pleased to see I wasn't the only one who had some trouble with it.

* Written in a chatty but unfocused and messy style, this book is 50% scholarly history and 50% gossip. There is nothing wrong in principle with this mix, which could make for a very entertaining story. Except that the scholarly stuff is poorly explained so that the nonspecialist has no idea what the words and concepts mean, 

*  As a non-specialist reader, I found the going increasingly difficult in the second half of the book, which revolves principally about a several years' war between the interpretivists (Chomsky et al) and the generative semanticists (Lakoff et al). The chapters dealing with the meat of this conflict were a little less transparent on the substance of the ideas at stake, and seemed (to this reader) to presuppose some (if not considerable) expertise on the part of the reader. 

*  The book is certainly not suitable for people outside the field because it involves too much linguistic theory, so in a sense the book fails to do what it wants to do. 

* Admittedly, some of the work in this field is rather dense, but the book could have been a lot clearer and more sprightly.

Now, I admit it, those quotations are selective.  (Other reviewers had no problem with this book).  But the point is that I'm not alone on this.  Other people struggled with the book as well.
Also, in the later chapters, when author Randy Allen Harris is really immersed in the nitty-gritty of the debate, he starts to forget that he is writing a popular science for non-specialists, and starts throwing around linguistic concepts without defining them.   For example, on page 185, he talks about the influences of H.P. Grice's work on conversational implicature on Generative Semantics, but never bothers to define what that work is.
Now, as it happens, I already knew about Grice's Maxims (thanks to books like An Introduction to Language, The Language Instinct, and Youtube series The Ling Space).  But I wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't been trying to read about linguistics.  And it's not (I don't think) something you can expect the average reader to know.

But then, just as I thought I was beginning to lose the plot of the book, Chapters 8, 9 and 10 get away from the heavy linguistic analysis, and go back to focusing on the personal and cultural side of the argument, and I was able to follow the narrative again.

All in all, this is a very impressive book that Randy Allen Harris has pulled off.  In order to write intelligently about this, he not only had to read all the literature of the period (and understand it), but also interview hundreds of people and put together a narrative of what actually happened.  
Harris's bio (according to the back cover) says that "he holds several degrees in communications, experimental linguistics, and English literature, and has published widely in all three fields."  I guess that's the kind of resume you would need to pull off a book like this!

The History
I'm going to summarize the events of this book.  It seems a little bit silly to put a spoiler warning on a non-fiction book, but there is nonetheless a certain pleasure in discovering this history at the pace that the author intends and with the framing that the author gives it.  Some of that may be ruined by reading my summary, so ***SPOILER WARNING***.

The book starts with a brief history of linguistics that starts all the way back with the ancient Greeks, and brings us up to the 20th Century.  It moves at a lightening quick speed (Harris calls it  "our Grand Prix review of linguistic history" p.16) but Harris manages to pull out an important theme that repeats throughout the history of linguistics.  Language and meaning is inherently subjective and fuzzy, but linguists throughout history have always wanted to develop approaches that would treat linguistics as a hard science--language is a natural object, and the linguist can study it in the same way that any other natural scientist studies natural objects.

But the exact methodology by which linguists achieve this aim has changed a lot over the centuries.  Harris recounts that each generation of linguists viewed the previous generation as not sufficiently objective, and each new generation tried to make linguistics a true science.

(This is one of the reoccurring jokes throughout the book.  "just as the middle class is always rising, linguistics is always becoming a science" Harris writes (p.16)).

In Europe, this search for objectivity took the form of historical linguistics.  (i.e. --going back to the old manuscripts to try to track how language has changed over time--Jacob Grimm being one of the famous historical linguists.)
However in the early 20th Century, the North American linguists went their own way.  North American linguists realized that there were a huge amount of Native American languages, and many of them were beginning to die out, and that these languages had not yet been recorded and archived.  So the North American linguists became concerned with what was called the "Amerindian Imperative"--the linguist's duty was to go out into the field, record as much of the language as they could, and try to create a grammar. 

This movement was led by Leonard Bloomfield, who devised taxonomic system for linguists to use when cataloguing languages, starting with the smallest units and then working up into more complex categories.  First, they would start with the phonetics (the acoustic wavelengths of sound created by speakers of the language).  Then, these phonetic sounds are classified into the phonemes of the language (i.e. the way a speaker perceives the sounds of a language--for example, an English speaker would divide the acoustic wavelengths for /r/ and /l/ into two separate phonemes, but a Japanese speaker would collapse them into a single phonemic category.)  Then the phonemes would be put together into words, and then the words could be put together into sentences.  
In order to keep linguistics as a respectable hard science, Bloomfield didn't want linguists mucking about with muddy subjects like how people convey thoughts into words, or what to do about the ambiguity of meaning.  That was all the job of other disciplines like sociology, philosophy, or psychology.  A linguist's job was simply to record and categorize the sounds and words of a language.

The good news is that under Bloomfield's influence, linguistics in North America obtained a new respectability in the scientific circles.

But as Harris writes on page 28:

The bad news amid all this promise, however, was the pronounced gaps in this work--the mind, meaning, thought; in short, the good stuff.
Lo, in the east, Chomsky arose.

The Linguistics Wars actually chronicles two separate wars.  Or perhaps more accurately, it chronicles a revolution, and then the subsequent civil war inside that revolution.

The first conflict is the Chomskyan revolution against the Bloomfieldians.  Chomsky arrived on the scene in the late 1950s, and rocked the linguistic world with his Syntactic Structures, which explored how elements in a sentence move and transform as the function of the sentence changes (e.g. active to passive, statement to question, affirmative statement to negative statement, independent clause to relative clause, etc).  Chomsky was also interested in figuring out what the core elements of the sentence were if you stripped away all the transformations--what Chomsky called the "Deep Structure."  And he hinted that the true meaning of a sentence could be found in its Deep Structure
It horrified the old guard Bloomfieldians, but it excited the younger generation of linguists, and the revolution was on.  Chomsky and his allies viciously attacked the old Bloomfieldian model at linguistic conferences, and insulted the intelligence of anyone who disagreed with them.

Chomsky was undeniably brilliant--Harris quotes from several contemporary linguists who were completely in awe of Chomsky's ability to think of new theories and solutions.  And he was a very skilled oral debater.  But he was also combative, and Harris pauses the narrative at this point to question whether Chomsky's personality was singlehandedly responsible for bringing in the combative atmosphere that was to characterize the study of syntax for the next generation.  Chomsky seemed to thrive on polemics, and Chomsky characterized the old guard Bloomfieldians as "the bad guys" in almost Manichean terms.  Perhaps this, Harris wonders, is the original reason why the subsequent Linguistics Wars would also be viewed by both sides in terms of good guys versus bad guys.

But as much as Chomsky criticized the Bloomfieldians, he too had been trained up in the Bloomfieldian system, and he still retained their influence in at last one key respect.  Chomsky did not want to get stuck talking about words and the problem of meaning.  He hinted at the promise of meaning with his "Deep Structure" model, but he never followed through on it.

So, when Chomsky was away on Sabbatical in 1966, the younger linguists started to expand Chomsky's model into a new paradigm that would actually tackle the problem of the meaning of words--generative semantics.
But when Chomsky came back in 1967, he attacked the model.  And the linguistics wars began.

At first, Chomsky did not seem to have much of a theoretical basis for his attacks.  His arguments didn't really make a whole lot of sense, and he seemed to be trying to destroy generative semantics just for the sake of it.  But Chomsky was a born polemicist and a skilled oral debater, and he was still able to appear to demolish the generative semanticist model, even if they thought he was misrepresenting their arguments.  And the generative semanticists hated him for it.

But on the other side, the generative semanticists were arrogant and disrespectful towards Chomsky.  Harris records an observer's recollection that generative semanticist George Lakoff told Chomsky he should come to Lakoff's lectures, 

[Lakoff] was combative and impolite ... [He] would go to Noam's class and sit at the front of the room.  One time Noam said something, and George said, "I have been saying the same thing. Noam asked "Where did you write about it?" And George responded, "I have been lecturing about these things, and if you are interested, you should come to my class". (p.153, brackets in Harris's quotation)

Harris goes on to note:

The level of gall required for anyone, let alone a junior lecturer, to tell the inventor of the field to attend his classes if he wanted to stay current goes right off the chutzpah meter. (p.153)

But then, Harris goes on to question the accuracy of the anecdote.  Did this really happen, or was someone just misremembering?

And here we get to the problem with this story.  All the really juicy stuff is anecdotal, and by the time Harris got around to chronicling it, it is all misremembered or in Rashomon like conflicting accounts.  The back and forth that was in the academic journals is, of course, still well-preserved.  (And subsequently much of Harris's book is just a recounting of what is in the academic journals).   But the personal drama is a lot more murky.  Harris has interviewed lots of people for this book, and alludes to what he calls "folklore" of this period.  Various people claim to remember screaming at academic conferences.  Apparently at one academic conference, Chomsky's graduate student and George Lakoff spent several minutes yelling obscenities at each other in front of everyone.  Someone else even remembers Chomsky and Lakoff physically wrestling for the microphone at one event. Is any of it true?  Well who knows?  Harris mentions these anecdotes briefly, but then dismisses them just as quickly.

The stories range quite widely in color and credibility, and it is difficult to take many of them at face value.  They have grown epic in the retelling: the stupidity of the antagonists, the forbearance of the protagonists, the simplicity and clarity of the point under dispute, are all surely exaggerated. (p.155)

 (It's probably an elementary point to make, but it strikes me how much has changed since the 1960s.  We've gotten so used to everything being recorded.  Nowadays Chomsky's linguistic lectures, and the debates at linguistic conferences, would all be up on Youtube for everyone to see.  But because this all happened back in the 1960s, it wasn't recorded.  And as Harris demonstrates, we can deduce from all these anecdotes that, whatever happened, emotions were certainly running very high during this period.  But we can't really put much faith in the specific things that people claim to remember.)

What is well documented, however, is that the media eventually got ahold of the story.  There was, coincidentally, a popular book out at the time recounting the fighting between Freud and his former disciple (A), so the public was predisposed to eat up this kind of drama, and once the media got ahold of the squabbling in the linguistics department, they framed it as the drama of Freud and Trausk being played out all over again.  The New York Times even did a story on it.

(Harris writes about The New York Times story, but isn't able to quote the whole thing.  But thanks to the miracle of the modern Internet, you can read the whole thing online at the New York Times archive: Former Chomsky Disciples Hurl Harsh Words at the Master, Sept. 10, 1972. (*4))

And, in the midst of all this, there was also the Vietnam War and the Counterculture movement.  Chomsky had by this time become one of the leading voices of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and with his anti-war work, he was essentially working two full time jobs all throughout this period, which affected how much time he was able to give to the conflict.  It's suggested that the conflict might have been softened if Chomsky had just met in person with the Generative Semanticists, but Chomsky didn't have time to meet with the generative semanticists because he was busy being giving talks on Vietnam and being interviewed by Time Magazine.  (And it's never stated explicitly by Harris, but it might well be the case that part of the reason Chomsky's arguments against generative semantics were initially so flimsy was because his attention was focused elsewhere on the Vietnam War.)
But the generative semanticists were also passionately against the war in Vietnam, and their opposition to the war was all throughout their published papers.  In a linguistics paper on syntax, they would use their example sentences to attack Nixon and Johnson (e.g. Lakoff's "In a very real sense, Nixon is a murderer.")  Harris recounts a back and forth between one of the generative semanticists and Cambridge University Press when the generative semanticist refused to remove critical references to Nixon, Agnew and others from her linguistic book.  

But at the same time, the generative semanticists passionately hated Chomsky.  And this makes for some ironies, as Harris points out on pages 199-200:

The political elements of the generative semantics style, however, throw something of a monkeywrench into the simple anti-Chomskyan account of their ethos.  The generative semanticists opposed the war in Vietnam, and Chomsky was one of its most outspoken critics. A simple analysis of this twist in the Oedipal story might put the political explicitness of many generative semanticists into the trying-to-out-Chomsky-Chomsky file...(p.199)

...It is, first, extremely difficult to out-Chomsky Chomsky on political issues... He was (and remains) a more tireless, dedicated political rhetor than any of the generative semanticists; in fact, it is only mildly hyperbolic to say he is more tireless and dedicated to political concerns than all of the generative semanticists combined. ... The generative semanticist were more explicit than Chomsky, in linguistic articles, about their political concerns.  But they were not, by even the wildest stretch of the term, more political... (p.200)

But another irony is that although Chomsky was more politically active than any of the generative semanticists, within the field of linguistics he was now beginning to be viewed as a conservative.  His research used primarily English (which many linguists now saw as ethnocentric, and an abandonment of the Amerindian Imperative).  He wasn't concerned with the growing interest in the sociopolitical dimensions of language.  And  he was very old fashioned and formal in his academic papers, unlike the generative semanticists who were attempting to bring counterculture into academia.

The generative semanticists embraced using obscenities, references to counterculture and drugs, and a lot of jokes in their academic papers.  Which then led into a whole debate (which Harris explores briefly) about whether or not it's ever appropriate to use jokes in a scientific paper.   (And interestingly enough, the very formal and stylistically conservative Chomsky actually defended the generative semanticists on this point(*5).)

To return to the linguistic controversy:
For a while, it looked like the Generative Semanticists would win out.  The younger linguists were excited about their model, and Chomsky's criticism of them didn't seem very substantial.

And yet, in the end, Chomsky's views won out.  The very flimsy proposals that Chomsky initially put forward were later developed into a fruitful program in the 1970s, and lead to the Chomskyan grammar that we know today (and which was described in Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction (*6).)  Generative Semantics, meanwhile, ended up spinning out in several different directions, and eventually stopped being a coherent movement.

So Much More To Talk About

In the section above, I've tried to give a brief summary of why this book is interesting.  But it strikes me now that I haven't even touched on half of the interesting stuff that is in this book--I didn't talk about Chomsky's take down of B.F. Skinner, for example.  Or the parody of Chomsky that George Lakoff wrote which did serious harm to his cause because too few people were in on the joke.  Or the irreverent antics of the Generative Semanticists in 1968 at the Chicago Linguistic Society.  I haven't even talked about the Generative Semanticists yet. I've mentioned George Lakoff, but there were actually 3 others--Paul Postal (*7), Haj Ross, and James McCawley who, along with George Lakoff, styled themselves The 4 Horsemen of Generative Semantics.  All of them have their own unique personality and backstory, and it's all in the book.
There's a lot more interesting stuff in this book than I can write in this review, is what I'm saying.  So if any of what I'm describing here sounds remotely interesting to you, go ahead and check out this book.

On Chomsky

Having so far praised this book, I should caution that it may be a niche taste.  Or in other words, I may have been predisposed to like this book because of my fascination with Noam Chomsky.

I've long been fascinated with Chomsky (see on my blog HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and many other posts.)  Of course, much of this fascination is ideological.  Like many progressives, I love Chomsky because he is such a great articulator of the progressive worldview.  But even beyond that, there is also cult of personality around Chomsky.  

Chomsky has been described as a charismatic figure.  I admit this was a description that surprised me when I first heard it. Chomsky had always struck me as a sort harmless old grandfather type figure, who was famous for giving long speeches in which he droned on and on in the same monotonous pitch.  But, as others have pointed out, there is a tone of authority in that monotonous droning which sucks people in, and makes you feel like Chomsky has all the answers.  (And I've been guilty as guilty as anyone of getting sucked in.)
The Linguistics Wars shows, among other things, that Chomsky's charismatic show of authority is not just for his political speeches.  He dazzled the entire linguistic community with his display of charismatic authority in the early 1960s.  In the late 1960s, he became a divisive figure in linguistics, but half of the linguistic community was still in thrall to his cult of personality. (*8)  I found it a fascinating history of a fascinating figure.

Author Randy Allen Harris tries to explore Chomsky's personality on pages 77-80, and finds it a curious contradiction--his incredible graciousness, combined with an arrogance and a combativeness.  (The combativeness is always masked behind Chomsky's gentle-sounding soft-spoken voice, but it's there if you listen to the content of what Chomsky says.)  
Harris also reports that Chomsky is a complete mystery to his colleagues--he never socializes with them, never goes out to lunch, never has people over to his house.  He comes off in some of these descriptions as almost as an emotionless robot. 
Except, as everyone in Harris's book acknowledges, he clearly feels very deeply for the oppressed and downtrodden of the world.
He is, when all is said and done, a very enigmatic and fascinating figure.  And that fascination was a large part of what made this book so interesting. (*9)

Other Notes
* As mentioned above, I believe this book is still in print (if you go through the trouble of special ordering it).  But it was originally published in 1993, and is now slightly dated.  References to The Simpsons (who were at the height of their cultural relevance in 1993) abound.  Also a lot of figures from the 1960s are name-dropped without explanation, as if the reader remembers who these figures are--figures like Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger. Memories of the 1960s were probably stronger in 1993 than in 2021.  (Although actually, all of these figures were just portrayed in the new movie The Trial of the Chicago 7.  So maybe now they are temporarily back in the public consciousness.)
But more relevant to the content, the book ends with a sort of epilogue analyzing the legacy of both Chomsky and Generative Semantics.  I would suspect that this legacy looks different now than it did in 1993, although not being in the field, I wouldn't know exactly how it has changed.

* It turns out that, like me, author Randy Allen Harris is a fan of Revolutions of 1848 by Priscilla Robertson.  References to Priscilla Robertson's Revolutions of 1848 pop up not once, but several times in The Linguistics Wars.  (3 times, in 3 different sections, by my count.)  Harris uses various quotes from Revolutions of 1848 to make analogies to what is happening in The Linguistics Wars.  To take just one example, when writing about how George Lakoff made a number of public relations blunders in his representation of Generative Semantics, Harris writes on page 227:

Radzetsky is reported to have told his troops retaking Sardinia for the Hapsburgs in 1848, "Spare the enemy generals--they are too useful to our side" (Robertson, 1952:354), Lakoff was such a general.

* Victoria Fromkin, whose book An Introduction to Language I read and reviewed on this blog, also pops up in this book.  She is quoted in a section recounting the early excitement of the Chomskyan Revolution against the Bloomfieldians, and she says that the weekly lectures by Robert Stockwell, an early Chomskyan convert, "more resembled the storming of the Winter Palace than scholarly discussions" (as quoted on page 72).

* George Lakoff co-authored a book The Metaphors We Live By, which I've not read, but which is often quoted by other linguists.  For example, Michael Lewis quotes it approvingly in The Lexical Approach.  So I had been vaguely familiar with the name Lakoff, but didn't know anything him prior to reading this book.   After reading this book, I have a much greater appreciation for who he is and his place in linguistic history. 

* And I just noticed that one of my professors from the University of Melbourne, Jean Mulder, is listed in the acknowledgements as one of the people that the author thanks for reading and commenting on earlier drafts.  (I know that this is only of interest to me, but I thought it was really neat to see someone I actually know from real life popping up in the book.  Although I doubt that Jean Mulder remembers me, she was very friendly and personable when I took her - class, and she would often stay after class to chat with us.)

* Even though I wasn't able to follow all of the linguistic theory being explained in the book, one thing was clear--the more both sides delved into English syntax, the more both sides found examples of English grammar they were unable to explain.

And this also reminds me of something connected to my time at the University of Melbourne, specifically something a professor said when explaining the mystery of language acquisition--even though linguists don't yet know all the rules of English grammar, a 5 year old child still intuitively knows all the rules.  So how could the child possibly have learned all these rules?  Well, that's the mystery of language acquisition.

I've thought about this quote a lot in the years since, especially when mentoring new teachers in TESOL.  Sometimes a new teacher will feel frustrated because they don't know all the rules of English grammar, and I'll say, "linguists haven't even figured out all the rules of English grammar yet".  
This book is a perfect example of how much there is about English grammar that linguists still can't explain.  (Which, to my mind, supports Krashen's theories.  You can't possibly teach all the English grammar to a student.  But you can give them lots of comprehensible input, and much of the grammar will be acquired through the input.)

* So, this is one of those books where a lot of the actual content is buried in the endnotes.  You'll be reading along, you'll come to a little number at the end of the sentence, and then you'll have to flick to the back of the book to read the endnote to get more information.
The endnotes are almost always important or interesting information, so you don't want to skip them.  But it's a pain in the neck to constantly be flipping back and forth between the chapter that you're reading and the notes at the end.  (I found this especially annoying since I tend to get most of my reading done during my lunch break.  So I'd be trying to hold my sandwich in one hand, keep track of my place in the chapter with the other hand, and flip to the endnotes at the back at the same time.)  
I wish that the endnotes could somehow have been more integrated into the text, but I can understand that because of the conventions of style, Harris had to put them to the back.  I just wish we lived in a world where the conventions of style were different, and I didn't have to deal with so many endnotes at the back of the book (*10).

Footnotes (docs, pub):

(*1) On the chattering that Tom Wolfe's book was causing on linguistic blogs at the time: In particular I remember E.J. Spode's review being shared a lot on Twitter and blogs.  Which, if you haven't read it yet, is a really good read.

(*2) On The Devil’s Accountant By Larissa MacFarquhar: I'd actually love to quote the whole section, but I have to limit myself to a few snippets, because that's all I think I can reasonably quote and still claim fair use.  But in the original article, Larissa MacFarquhar devotes 5 whole paragraphs to the linguistics wars, and her description of it is interesting.  I'd recommend checking out the whole article.
I first heard about this New Yorker article sometime around 2009 or so, when I was watching a Youtube video of Chomsky on Book TV CSPAN 2.  (The actual TV appearance is from 2003, but I didn't see it on Youtube until around 2009 or 2010.)  In that interview, a caller asks Chomsky what he thought of The New Yorker piece.  He said that it was a typical attack piece by the mainstream media meant to discredit an enemy, and that it should be read with caution.  And so I'd pass along Chomsky's caveat.  It should be read, but read with caution.  (The overall tone of the piece is undeniably hostile to Chomsky).    And yet, it's an interesting piece nonetheless.  And well-written, at least on the level of prose-style.

The anti-Chomsky bias is, however, right there even in the brief bits I quoted.  It makes it sound like the generative semanticists were devoted disciples who felt completely betrayed when their master turned against them.  The version told in Randy Allen Harris's book hints that at least one of them, George Lakoff, was actively courting the fight.  He wasn't a dutiful disciple, he was actively trying to topple Chomsky's model, and he said so.

Noam Chomsky interview on his Life and Career (2003)

(*3) The 4 Years This Book Sat On My Shelf: I mentioned this book in on my April 25, 2018 Vlog, The Books on My Shelf Part 3: The Books I Haven't Even Started.  Watch from 11:44

As I mentioned in the video, I loaned out The Linguistics Wars to a friend/co-worker of mine who had ambitions to do an advanced degree in linguistics.  "This seems like the kind of book that might be really useful to you," I told him, "and I'm not going to get around to it for a while, so you might as well read it in the meantime."  He then kept it for several months.  He kept assuring me he was still reading it, and enjoying it during that time.  (He must have been a slow reader just like me).  And eventually he got it back to me.  He said he really enjoyed it.

I told him I was going to read it someday, but I wanted to finish Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction first so I had the background for it.  He told me that was unnecessary.  The Linguistics Wars explains all the technical points as it goes, he said, so no background reading is necessary.
My sister, when I saw her again in 2019 and confessed that I still hadn't started The Linguistics Wars, told me the same thing.
And I think they were both right in the end.  Having read Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction helped me with a bit of the technical part of The Linguistics Wars, but not a lot.  Partly because Chomsky's theories have changed so much over the years that the current state of Chomsky's grammar theories are very different to what Chomsky's theories were in the 1960s.  

Indeed, much of the changes which resulted in Chomsky's current theories, it turns out, were sparked by the linguistics wars.  So if anything, I probably should have read The Linguistics Wars first.

(*4) Regarding the New York Times article being available online: And in fact, if you're interested in reading more of this material online, the 1972 vitriolic exchange of letters between Chomsky and George Lakoff in the New York Review (which is also recounted in The Linguistics Wars) is also available online.  (Randy Allen Harris mentions this exchange in his book, but he can't quote the letters in full.)  But George Lakoff's letter is HERE, and Chomsky's reply is HERE.  (The article that Lakoff was responding to is, unfortunately, behind the paywall.)

(*5) On Writing Jokes in Scientific Papers: This is one of many topics in the book that I don't have time to explore fully in a review.  But I do think Chomsky's response was interesting.  Even though he opposed the generative semanticists, he defended their right to use jokes in their papers.  Chomsky is quoted on page 211 as saying:

Science is like any other human activity.  You don't have to put a straightjacket on it.  If people like to give papers with jokes, that's fine.  It's neither good nor bad. Maybe it's more fun to listen to their papers, I don't know.  But it shouldn't [affect one's evaluation of] their results. (Chomsky quoted in Harris page 211.  Brackets in Harris.)

Sounds reasonable to me. 

(*6) On Chomsky's grammar developing in the 1970s: In fact, as Randy Allen Harris explains, it turns out that the whole trace theory, which I talked about in my review of Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction, developed during this period.  

(*7) Take, for example, Paul Postal.  The way he is, as described in The Linguistics Wars, he comes off as the least flamboyant of the 4 horsemen.  And yet, he has a very interesting journey.  He starts out as a vicious attack dog for the Chomskyans against the Bloomfieldians.  (One of his attacks against the Bloomfieldians was so nasty that it got voted stricken from the record at a Linguistic Society meeting. ) But then Postal ended up as one of Chomsky's adversaries in the Generative Semantic debate.  In the 2003 New Yorker article I linked to above, they give this little quote: 

Paul Postal, these days a professor at N.Y.U., still loathes Chomsky with an astonishing passion. “After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false,” Postal says. “He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake.” 

If you go to Paul Postal's Wikipedia page, it contains a link  to a 2006 blogpost he wrote criticizing Chomsky's leftist politics.   Apparently somewhere along the line, Postal left the counterculture values of the Generative Semantics movement to become a hardcore rightist.
So this is one of many little rabbit holes you can go down with the issues and personalities involved in this book.  I don't have time to go into all of them, but there's a lot of fascinating stuff like that in this book.

(*8) On Chomsky as being a charismatic figure: In this interview here (at around the 1:32) mark, Steven Pinker says: "Linguistics is an eccentric field in some ways, partly because it was so polarized by a charismatic figure [Noam Chomsky] and his opponents that it didn't proceed in the ordinary direction of making the theory more precise, more testable." 

(*9) On the enigmatic Noam Chomsky: I'm reminded (again) of this Salon.com article: When Chomsky wept, which shows similar themes.  First of all, Chomsky's complete indifference to normal human interactions:

I was also struck by his self-deprecation. He had a near-aversion to talking about himself -- contrary to most of the "Big Foot" journalists I had met. He had little interest in small talk, gossip or discussion of personalities, and was focused almost entirely on the issues at hand. He downplayed his linguistic work, saying it was unimportant compared to opposing the mass murder going on in Indochina. He had no interest whatsoever in checking out Vientiane's notorious nightlife, tourist sites or relaxing by the pool. He was clearly driven, a man on a mission. He struck me as a genuine intellectual, a guy who lived in his head.

...which at first makes you think he's incapable of normal human emotions, but then later on in the article, we see how much he is affected by the suffering of the oppressed:

I was thus stunned when, as I was translating Noam's questions and the refugees' answers, I suddenly saw him break down and begin weeping. I was struck not only that most of the others I had taken out to the camps had been so defended against what was, after all, this most natural, human response. It was that Noam himself had seemed so intellectual to me, to so live in a world of ideas, words and concepts, had so rarely expressed any feelings about anything. I realized at that moment that I was seeing into his soul.

(*10) Complaining about the endnotes: Yes, I know. I know.  But the fact that I'm hypocritical doesn't invalidate the legitimacy of the complaint.  It's still annoying in Harris's book.  Whether or not it's equally annoying when I do it is another question.

Weekly Reading Vlogs:  

May 9, 2021  The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.0-16
May 16, 2021 The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.16-84
May 23, 2021 The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.84-168
May 30, 2021 The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.168-250
June 6, 2021 The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.250-260
June 13, 2021 The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.1-14

Video Review  (Playlist HERE)
Video Review HERE and embedded below:

Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction by V.J. Cook and Mark Newson [Second Edition]

 (Book Review)

Started: I've got a long history with this book (see below), but it first popped up on my "Currently Reading List" in February 2017--before I began my "Started" and "Finished" posts.
Finished: December 15, 2020

My History With This Book / Why I Read This Book
This book had been sitting on my shelf for years before I finally got around to reading it.  

I originally ordered this book off of Amazon way back in 2009.  At that time, I had been accepted to the University of Melbourne to study Applied Linguistics, but I hadn't yet left to start my course.  I had never studied linguistics before, and I wanted to do some background reading before I started the course. But, not having the background in linguistics, I was also nervous about starting with anything too technical.  So I ordered three books off of Amazon with the idea of gradually easing myself into the subject matter.  The idea is that the first book would be a popular book that overlapped with linguistics in some way, the second book would be more focused on linguistics but still written for a popular audience, and the third book would be a proper linguistics textbook, but one that was at the introductory level.  So I ordered Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, and, lastly, Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction.

I - had - long - been - a - devotee - of - Chomsky's - political - work, but (like a lot of people) only vaguely knew about Chomsky's linguistic theories.  So after having read Chomsky's political works for so long, I thought it would be interesting to find out what his linguistic theories actually were.  The book was titled "An Introduction" and so, I naively thought, it would be aimed at the non-technical reader--a nice little way for me to get a general introduction to Chomsky's linguistics so that I could sound intelligent at cocktail parties.

...and then the book arrived in the mail, I took one look at it, and immediately realized it was beyond my current comprehension level.  (This is the problem with ordering a book sight unseen off of Amazon.  I thought I was getting a friendly little introductory book, and I got a technical graduate level textbook.)

To illustrate this, I'll quote a paragraph at random.  Now, granted I am taking this out of context, but this will give you a general idea of the readability of this book.  Imagine flipping through the book and coming across paragraphs like this: 

The question now arises of how an element can avoid having a governing category. This is the central role of government in unifying Binding Theory and the principle that PRO must be ungoverned. Recall that the governing category is partly defined by the presence of a governor in that it may be defined as the smallest clause which contains both the pronoun and its governor. Therefore, an element will fail to have a governing category whenever it fails to be governed; the fact that PRO must be ungoverned is derived from the assumption that it is a pronominal anaphor which therefore must not have a governing category. (p.255)

...or flip to the "Quick Reference List" at the back of the book for more gibberish.

From page 346.  Granted this is the appendix (not the main text).  But still, right?

This is obviously not a book for the lay person, but for the dedicated student.  So stay away from this book unless you are serious about linguistic!

But, if anyone else out there is looking for a nice little non-technical introduction to Chomsky's theories so you can sound intelligent at cocktail parties (as I once was), that book is out there, as I later discovered.  It's called The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker and, after shelving Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction, I had the good fortune to stumble upon The Language Instinct shortly before starting my course.  And since then, the knowledge that I got from The Language Instinct has been more than sufficient to keep me up to speed in any bar room conversation about Chomsky's universal grammar.

...but, over the past 10 years, Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction has stayed on my bookshelf.  I've kept it in my suitcase as I've moved from America to Australia to Cambodia and then to Vietnam.  And I've kept meaning to get around to reading it one day.
You see, when I decided to spend the time and money on a Master's Degree in Applied Linguistics, I was officially acknowledging that linguistics was now my career path.  Previously I had always considered myself a history guy, and TESOL  (*1)was just something I was doing until I found a more permanent career.  But now, I was making a commitment to educate myself about all things linguistics.
Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction was too far above my current level, it's true, but the solution was then to start reading some basic linguistics books until I worked my way up to a level at which I was ready for Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction.

To further explain my motivations, I suppose I should also talk about how useful knowledge of Chomsky's Universal Grammar is for the TESOL teacher--or at least my perception of how useful it would be.  Although these abstract linguistic theories have very little impact on the day-to-day classroom, most books on Second Language Acquisition do talk about Chomsky.  Chomsky gets at least a brief mention in almost all the books I've read on TESOL.  Some books, for example, How Languages are Learned and Second Language Learning Theories, both contain several pages talking about Chomsky's theories.  In fact, according to many of these books, the field of Second Language Acquisition got its start when Chomsky's theories of Universal Grammar was first applied to the interlanguage of language learners in the 1970s.  (Before then, Second Language Acquisition did not exist as its own separate academic discipline.)
Scott Thornbury (famous for - multiple - TESOL -  methodology - books) will occasionally write about Chomsky's theories on his blog.  Stephen Krashen (the most influential author in TESOL during the 1980s) was famously influenced by Chomsky's theories. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics contains several entries related to some of the more technical aspects Chomskyan grammar (things like theta-criterion or government).  Et cetera.
In other words, I got the impression that if you wanted to be taken seriously in the world of TESOL, you had to have at least some familiarity with Chomsky's theories.  It may not matter much to the humble classroom teacher, but if you had ambitions to advance in the TESOL world, it seemed like something all the smart people knew.
And (and here I admit to my vanity) I wanted to be one of the smart people.  I wanted to be in the club of people who have read and understood Chomsky's theories.

I was also influenced by the fact that I had long regarded Chomsky as my hero because of his political work.  This is silly, of course, because one need not subject themselves to Chomsky's linguistic writings in order to appreciate his political work.  (Chomsky himself has said on numerous occasions that there is no connection between the two.)  But after so many years of obsessing over Chomsky's political work, it just seemed appropriate to get more familiar with his linguistic theories.  I know, it's a stupid reason to slog my way through a book like this, but there it is. (*2)

All that, plus I thought that because this book was heavy on technical grammar, reading it might help my own declarative knowledge of English grammar rules (*3).  (Throughout my career as an English teacher, I've been on a never-ending-quest to be able to answer all the grammar questions my students have.)

And so over the past ten years I've been trying to educate myself to a level where I could understand this book.  In addition to all the TESOL books I've been reading, I've also tried to read some introductory linguistic books, like An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin, or A Little Book of Language by David Crystal (*4).  But I never felt like I was making any progress towards the kind of technical knowledge I needed to get into formal linguistics.  Instead, I felt like I was mostly just spinning my wheels reading the same introductory information over and over again without breaking into the technical stuff.  (Where are all the mid-level linguistic books?  The ones that are slightly more advanced than an introduction, but not quite at the graduate level yet.)

Eventually I decided that I probably was never going to get to a point where I felt confident reading this book.  I should either just take the plunge, and start reading, or get rid of it.  So I decided to take the plunge.
My decision to start reading this book was also influenced by a blogpost that Freddie deBoer wrote on reading a few years ago.  He mentioned that it's a good idea to be reading several books at once, and at least one book should be something above your current level.  How else are you going to improve if you don't start trying stuff above your current level?  Well, I thought, this Chomsky book is definitely above my current level--this will fit that criteria nicely (*5)

So, around February 2017, I finally started reading this book.

My Experience Reading This Book
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the first couple chapters were actually surprising readable.  I had been intimidated by this book for so long, but had I been needlessly intimidated?
But after making a decent start on this book, and getting about 60 pages in or so, I got distracted by other things.
I made a trip back home to America in the spring of 2017 in which I took the opportunity to visit bookstores and load up on a - bunch - of - new -  books, which were more interesting and readable and quickly diverted my attention.  (Including another book on Chomsky's linguistic theories--The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe--which was much stupider than Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction, but also way more readable and way more entertaining.)

Then, once I got back to Vietnam, I found it hard to make time for this book, since I was juggling two different bookclubs--one for general fiction, and one for professional development.  In fact, for the next couple years, my professional development reading time was taken up the professional development bookclub, which was exclusively focused on reading for the DELTA.  

In April of 2018, I made a video talking about all the books I was currently reading, and how I had essentially stalled out on Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction, but was still planning on returning to it one day once I cleared out my reading list.  (Watch from 9:25 of the video to see the part about Chomsky's Universal Grammar.)

And then I actually went and did the DELTA module 2, which took up all my free time in the fall of 2018.  And then after DELTA Module 2, all my professional development reading was focused on DELTA Module 3 for the next year after that. (*6)

But then, finally, I was all finished with the DELTA.  And it was time to return to Chomsky's Universal Grammar and see if I couldn't knock that one out next.

So I started reading this book again in the spring of 2020. (Enough time had passed that I just decided to go back to the beginning.)

As I mentioned above, the first chapter is actually surprisingly readable.  I was sitting in a coffee shop, reading this book, sipping my espresso, and feeling very intellectual and very proud of myself for how well I was understanding everything.

But then, at the beginning of chapter 2, there was some warning that I may be headed into trouble:

This chapter gives an overview of principles and parameters theory and an informal presentation of some key areas; chapter 3 looks at general ideas of language acquisition within the framework suggested in this chapter. Chapters 4-8 give a fuller, more technical account of the extended GB/Barriers framework. Non-technical readers can then get some concept of what the theory is about by reading chapters 1-3; specialists can persevere through to chapter 8; the more dedicated can attempt the latest theory, Minimalism in chapter 9. (from pages 42-43.  The added emphasis on certain words is my own.)

specialists...dedicated...okay, so this is pretty much just saying that if you're not already a linguistics graduate student, you're not going to understand chapters 4 to 8, and especially chapter 9, right?  Well, at least the authors are giving you fair warning. (*7)
I wrote in the margins on page 43, "Am I in trouble?"  As it turned out: yes, yes I was. 

I found chapters 2 and 3 dense, but readable.  I had to read slowly, and I made lots of notes in the margins about all the questions I had, but I was able to make sense of it.  

Chapters 4  (The X-bar Theory of Phrase Structure) and 5 (θ-Theory and Functional Categories) were more of a challenge.  For the most part, I was able to understand the "what" but not the "why".  I was frequently writing in the margins things like "How do we know this?" or "...but why is this?"  Nevertheless, I was still able to understand (for the most part) the basic rules the text was laying out, even if I couldn't understand where those rules came from.
Chapter 6 (Movement and Case Theory) had whole paragraphs where I didn't understand anything.  On page 202, I wrote in the margins next to the second paragraph "I may be reaching my limits in this book.  I'm not understanding any of this." (*8) But those few paragraphs aside, I felt like I was largely able to understand the bulk of the chapter.
But by Chapter 7 (Government and Other Developments), the number of paragraphs I didn't understand were growing in number.  At the bottom of page 255, I wrote in the margins "At this point, I've largely given up trying to understand".  On page 262, I wrote next to the first paragraph, "I don't understand."  Next to the second paragraph on the same page I wrote, "I don't understand. I've read this multiple times. I have a headache." (*9)

Perhaps I was just too stupid to comprehend a book like this.

Or...maybe I just didn't have the background.

Chapter 7 opens by talking about the concept of "government" from traditional, pre-Chomskyan grammars.  And it occurred to me, rather belatedly, that the reason I wasn't ready for a book like this is because I hadn't studied enough grammar.  Over the past 10 years, I had been reading introductory books on linguistics in the hope that it would eventually get me ready to read Chomsky.  But, this had been all wrong.  What I needed to have done was to read grammar books.

Now, to be fair, I have in the past 10 years read a few different grammar books, and reviewed them on this blog: here, here, here, here and here.  But these were all pedagogical grammars aimed at ESL teachers.  These weren't formal linguistic structural grammars.  That's what I should have been reading.

I don't know... the truth is even at the time it seemed like a bit of a long shot.  The text of the last few chapters had been so difficult to parse that I suspected that it might be more than a lack of background knowledge--it might just be that this book was impossible to understand.  

And yet, the idea of a new study project excited me.  I'd always had it in the back of my mind to really bone up on my grammar.  
I went to the school library to look for the thickest, most thorough grammar I could find.  And I found The Grammar Book: An ESL/EFL Teacher's Course by Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen-Freeman.  

It was still primarily a pedagogical grammar aimed at ESL teachers--there was no getting away from that.  I live in Vietnam and only have access to these books via my school library.  I wasn't going to be able to track down a formal structural linguistic book out here in Vietnam.  But this book did at least appear to be thorough, and it made use of the same types of phrase structure sentence trees that Chomskyan linguistics use.  Perhaps, just perhaps, absorbing the knowledge of The Grammar Book could help me make better sense of Chomsky's Universal Grammar.

Started: The Grammar Book by Marianne Celce-Murcia and Diane Larsen-Freeman

Now, as you can perhaps tell from the started video, there was a part of me that knew this was a bad idea all along.  I'm very good at starting new books and starting new study projects, but I'm very bad at finishing them.  In fact, one of the reasons I'm so bad at finishing books is because I always start new books before I finish old ones.  Is this what I was doing now?  

As it turned out... yes, that's exactly what I was doing.  In the weeks after that, I read more and more of The Grammar Book, and less and less of Chomsky's Universal Grammar.  

I wouldn't go so far as to say that The Grammar Book was interesting.  (It is, after all, a grammar book.)  But it was understandable.  I could get through a chapter and actually understand everything I read, so it reading it gave me a feeling of satisfaction.  And it contained information that was actually useful to me in my day-to-day teaching.

But the other thing was, back in July 2020, I actually had a lot of free time to read.  In Vietnam, we were slowly coming out of Covid lockdown in July 2020, but language schools weren't quite up to full schedules again.  I had long breaks in between classes in the afternoon in which I headed down to the coffee shop and read as much as I could.  I didn't fully appreciate at the time that this luxury reading time wasn't going to stick around forever. (*10)

In August I started a new job while still staying part time at my old one, and suddenly became super busy.  I barely had time to read one book, let alone two.  For a couple of months, I drifted into only reading The Grammar Book and ignoring Chomsky's Universal Grammar.  After having gotten so close to the end, I was now in danger of losing focus on this book again just like I did 3 years ago.  But I really wanted to finish.  Just because of stubbornness if nothing else, I really wanted to get to the end.  And so I eventually decided to temporarily shelve The Grammar Book (*11), and just focus on finishing Chomsky's Universal Grammar. 

Between getting distracted by The Grammar Book and being really busy at work, I had taken a couple months break on Chomsky's Universal Grammar.  And when I came back to it in November, I found that the break had done me absolutely no favors.  I couldn't remember some of the terminology.  I couldn't remember some of the old rules from earlier in the book, and now later in the book new rules were being introduced that were based on the old rules I couldn't remember.  In short, I was feeling more lost than ever before.  

I shouldn't have allowed myself to take that break, obviously.  But what to do about it now?  Should I try to go back to the beginning to refresh everything in my memory?  Probably, but I was worried that if I did that I would never finish this book.
Plus, what was the point?  If I could forget so much in just a couple months, then what would my memory be like in 5 years?  Over the passage of time, I retain in my long term memory so little of what I read.  It's frustrating, but it's also a part of being human.  In 5 years time, I was not going to be able to talk intelligently about case theory and government and theta theory.  I could barely remember it after 2 months.  

And so, at this point, I decided to just plow on through and finish the book.  Who even cared if I was understanding at this point. I just wanted to be done with it. (*12)

I finally finished it on December 15, 2020.    

"Oof! Finally." I wrote on the finished post, "I wasn't sure I would ever finish this book.  

Actually I'm still not sure I really have.  Can I really claim to have finished a book when I didn't understand the last third of it?"

Actually, upon reflection, I think that's an exaggeration.  It would be inaccurate to say I didn't understand anything of the last 3rd.  I understood about 40% to 50%.  I understood in general terms what the idea of each section was.  But I was definitely not understanding the details.

Also on December 15, I wrote: "I'm not sure how long it's going to take me to get a review up, but it could well be several weeks.  And I think I'm going to go back and re-read some of this book first before I write up my review."

Well, I re-read the first 65 pages, but then ended up finishing Don Quixote (another book that it had taken me years to read), and ended up spending the next month after that re-reading parts of Don Quixote in preparation for my review.

But after Don Quixote was finally finished off, I returned again to Chomsky's Universal Grammar.  I decided to once again start back at page 1, and have been re-reading it, and talking about it in my Weekly Reading Vlogs for the past several weeks. (*13)

And now, here we are, finally, with the review.

The Review

So, ordinarily when I write these blog posts, I try to keep The Review part separate from my reminiscences of the reading experience.  But in this case, my account of my struggles to read this book is actually pretty much my review.  It started off good, but then each chapter got more and more difficult and hard to read until I wasn't understanding most of it.  That's my review.

And I'm still not sure whose fault it is.  Is it the author's fault for writing in a really incomprehensible way?  Or is it simply that I've reached the limits of my intelligence, and that this book is written for a more intelligent technical audience?

I obviously can't answer that question.  I can't be an unbiased judge of my own ability.

For example, while I read this book, I took notes in the margins, and there were numerous times when I was convinced that there must be a mistake in the book.  The example sentence didn't match the authors' analysis.  The authors said D-Structure when they should have said S-Structure.  The wrong word got written in by mistake (*14). Et cetera 
Were there really a lot of mistakes in this book?  Well, who knows?  On the one hand, my experience with textbooks in general is that they routinely go to press with a lot of minor slips in them (for whatever reason).  So it's not inconceivable that there are mistakes in this book.  On the other hand, I've already admitted that this book was above my comprehension level.  So who am I to say that there were mistakes?  Maybe I just wasn't understanding the explanation. 

I am, however, feeling fairly confident when I say that this book could have been easier to read.  There were a lot of paragraphs that were really difficult to understand, and I know we're dealing with some pretty technical linguistic concepts here, but I don't think it had to be as difficult to read as it was.  With a bit more explanation, a few more examples, and some clearer prose, I think this book could have been a lot easier to read.  

But I know it's written for a specialist audience, so maybe it works fine for its target audience.  

So I checked Amazon and Goodreads to see what other people were saying about this book.  I expected to find solace in hearing other people complain about how difficult this book was to understand.  But quite the contrary.  I couldn't find any negative reviews (*15).

* Everybody will enjoy this book.

* this is certainly a great introduction

* I was actually pretty surprised at how easy it was to read this book. 

* It's not particularly useful for people who have had some background in syntax. As the author states in the introduction, this book is for those who are new to the subject.

* Great book, easy to understand. Very much to the point.

* It is well-written and lucid, presenting basic Government & Binding theory in terms that are very easy to understand. I doubt a single non-technical introduction to generative grammar of this brevity and clarity has yet been written

* This book is an easy reading to cover every important part of GB.

* Clear, neat, excellent pb text on a difficult topic

* This is a great source for understanding grammar. The book is also fun to read which I was not expecting.

...Oh come on!  No one else wants to complain about how this book had a lot of dense paragraphs that were really difficult to understand?  No one?  Is it just me then?

Okay, so its just me.  I'm the dumbass.

Now, to be fair to myself, I understood the first 3 chapters (p.1-133), and I understood most of chapters 4-6 (p.133-233).  And I understood little of chapters 7-9 (p.234-344).  But that's still about two-thirds of the book I understood.  So I'm not completely dumb.

But clearly I'm not one of the smart kids either. (*16)

But, I also maintain, that the book definitely could have been clearer.

There were also several times where the transitions between ideas weren't clear.  Sometimes the authors just started a new idea without any transition.  At times, they switched ideas without transition even within a single paragraph.  This kind of thing could definitely have been cleaned up.

On the other hand, I shouldn't make it sound like this book was all bad.  There were sections where I thought the author's explanations were quite clear, especially in comparison to other books on linguistics that I had read.  
For example, in my review of Introducing Chomsky by John Maher and Judy Groves, I complained that their explanation of the difference between E-Language and I-Language was incomprehensible.  

In contrast, I thought the explanation of E-Language and I-Language in Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction was actually very clear and easy to understand. (Also, the authors of Chomsky's Universal Grammar also did a very good job of explaining what the difference is between the E-Language/I-Language distinction, and the Competence/Performance distinction, something that I had long been confused about from my other readings.)

In my review of Understanding Second Language Acquisition by Lourdes Ortega, I complained that Ortega's definition of "markedness" was confusing.  But in contrast, the explanation of "markedness" in Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction was extremely clear.

So there were definitely sections of this book that were very well written.  It's just that the author's couldn't carry me all the way through.

Nor should I make it sound like this book wasn't interesting.  It could be very interesting at points. Granted I really struggled with this book, but if you're willing to struggle with it, there are some fascinating little tidbits you can gain along the way.  

The fascinating thing about linguistics is the idea that somewhere in your brain there is a very complex language system that is operating entirely below the level of conscious thought. As a native speaker, you seldom think about the grammar of what you're saying.  But somewhere in your brain, there is a grammar system that is sorting out everything you say into syntax without you having to think about it.  And the study of exactly what this system is, and how it works, and trying to figure out its rules are, can be fascinating.

Chomskyan linguistics has proposed a whole system of sentence trees broken into phrase structures, and tried to discover what the rules are for what phrases can move to what places in the sentence, and it's all fascinating to contemplate.  Even though I struggled with this book, I found the idea that this system was somehow embedded somewhere in my brain fascinating.

There are a lot of examples of this all throughout the book, but I'm going to try to just give one example for the purposes of illustrating the type of thing that I'm talking about.  This is the idea of traces.  It's slightly confusing, but also at the same time really fascinating.  It's the idea that when a word moves around in a sentence, it leaves a trace.  And our subconscious language system is keeping track of where that trace is, even if our conscious brain is totally unaware of it.

The example that the authors give on page 156 are the sentences: "I want to visit Mr Jones" (meaning a visitor in a hospital telling the nurse who he wants to visit) and "I want Mr Jones to visit" (meaning a patient in a hospital telling the nurse who he wants to come visit him).  Now, for both of these sentences, to make a who question we change "Mr Jones" into "who" and move it to the front of the sentence.  But in both cases, it leaves a trace behind.  You can't hear the trace, but it's still there.

"Who do you want to visit (trace)?"

"Who do you want (trace) to visit?"

Now, how do we know that trace is still there?  Because in the first sentence we can contract it to "wanna" and keep the same meaning, but in the second sentence, the trace prevents the contraction.  

That is to say "Who do you want to visit?" could have either meaning (i.e. who do you want to go see, or who do you want to come see you).  But "Who do you wanna visit?" can only mean a question in which you are being asked who you want to go see.
Isn't that fascinating?  So on a conscious level, of course, you're not thinking about grammar or traces, you're just trying to ask a simple question.  But on a subconscious level, your language system is busy moving things around and keeping track of the traces without you even realizing it.

Did I do a good job of explaining all that?  If not, the guys at The Ling Space made a whole video about this exact phenomenon:

Syntactic Movement and Traces

In fact, a lot of the content of this book pops up on  The Ling Space.  (I'm guessing the guys over at The Ling Space must have a copy of this book.  There's just so much overlap in content that I don't think it's a coincidence.) 

I had previously watched and reviewed The Ling Space on this blog back in 2016, and I'm really glad that I did, because my memories of The Ling Space videos helped me through a lot of the section in this book.  At a couple different points in this book, I wrote in the margins "The only reason I'm able to follow what's going on here is because of the Ling Space episode on the same topic."

General Comments

Sorry, let me start over and try to give some useful general information about this book.  (The type of information you would find in any normal book review.)
The edition I have is the second edition, published in 1996.  (The first edition was published in 1988).  The edition I read is not the most current edition, because there was a third edition published in 2007.  
(I don't believe I was aware there were multiple editions of this book when I ordered it off of Amazon years ago.  Either way, I'm not particularly bothered that I don't have the most current edition, because I'm not reading this book for the test.  I just wanted to dip my toes into the theory and see what Chomskyan Linguistics was all about.)

Although the book is titled Chomsky's Universal Grammar, the book is not actually by Chomsky himself.  It's by V.J. Cook and Mark Newson, who are explaining Chomsky's theories to the reader. 
A claim that is often made--both from Chomsky's supporters and his detractors--is that Chomsky's linguistic writing is difficult to understand for people who are not already experts in the field, so presumably that's one reason that Cook and Newson take it upon themselves to explain Chomsky.  But the other thing that quickly becomes apparent from this book is that "Chomsky's Universal Grammar" is not all about Chomsky alone.  Rather, this is the work of a whole school of linguists working within Chomsky's Universal Grammar framework, and Cook and Newson are citing other linguists just as frequently as they're citing Chomsky

The basic theory is part philosophical and part technical.  The philosophical part is the idea that humans don't learn grammar--instead we are born with grammar already pre-programmed into our DNA.  Even though every language is different, there are nonetheless universal principles which underline the grammar of every human language, and human beings are born with these principles.
This may or may not be true (see Chomsky's detractors: here and here ), but it's a simple enough concept to understand, even for the lay person.  This philosophical part covers roughly page 1-132 of the book.
Where the book gets complicated is in the effort to map out exactly what this universal grammar is--complete with sentence trees, and efforts to define what the rules for movement.   This is roughly pages 133-344 of the book.

Another thing that makes universal grammar confusing is that Chomsky's theories have undergone a lot of evolution over the years, so that there's not just one theory of universal grammar--there are several.  Authors Cook and Newson do their best to avoid burdening the reader with too much history, and try to only present the most current version of the theory, but they can't help getting into it a little, sometimes if only to explain to their readers why the terminology in Chomskyan linguistics has changed from decade to decade.

And speaking of changes to the theory, the most recent development (at least at the time of the second edition) was the Minimalist Program.  According to the authors' introduction, co-author Mark Newson was brought onboard specifically because of his expertise on the Minimalist Program.  (The first edition was written by V.J. Cook alone, but V.J. Cook didn't feel confident describing the Minimalist Program, so Mark Newson was brought in for the second edition.)
The Minimalist Program was Chomsky's effort to reduce all the principles of Universal Grammar to the fewest number of explanatory principles--it was chapter 9 of this book, and to be perfectly honest I understood very little of it, so I won't make any more comments about it here.

Because this is a textbook, the authors have included a little summary at the end of each section to summarize what the main point of the previous section had been.  These were useful.  In my own reading, I would usually flip forward and try to read these before starting each section.  My hope was to preview and mentally organize my reading ahead of time, but it never worked because I could never understand any of the summaries until after I read the section.  Take, for example, the summary at the end of The Case Filter (p.230)

Case Theory: the Case Filter

Case Filter: 'Every phonetically realised NP must be assigned (abstract) Case' (Chomsky, 1986a, p.74)

Gloss: This therefore eliminates as possible surface structures any sentence with an NP that has not received abstract Case, thus motivating NP-movements such as the passive to avoid NPs occurring in Caseless positions.

Visibility: assigning Case to an NP makes it 'visible' so it can be θ-marked, making the Case Filter fall within the Principle of Full Interpretation.  

(In the original book formatting, these summaries are all put in a little grey box, but you get the idea hopefully).
So, that's complete gibberish, right?  But, I would then go back and read the section, and then after I had actually read the section, then I could actually make sense of the summary at the end.  (At least, until the middle of chapter 7, when my comprehension started breaking down completely.  But for the first 6 and a half chapters I could usually make sense of it.)

Occasionally, in my marginal notes, I would note that the section summary had been put in the wrong place.  (It was relatively rare, but it happened a few times where the section summary was put in the beginning of the subsequent section instead of at the end of the section it was summarizing.  I suspect this was for formatting issues--they didn't want the section summary box to get broken up by the page break.)

The end of the book has an appendix, which is a quick reference list of all the Principles, Parameters and Operations used within the book.  It is, however, not a glossary of all the technical terms that pop up in the book, but rather just the index of the Principles of Universal Grammar.  Many was the time I wished there had been a glossary at the end of the book, because there were a lot of technical terms that I had trouble keeping track of as I read.

Epilogue

So, when I reviewed Introducing Chomsky by John Maher and Judy Groves, I complained that it was too difficult for me to understand.  And when I reviewed The Ling Space, I complained that it was difficult for me to understand.  And now, here I am again complaining that this is difficult for me to understand.

Perhaps it's time to just admit that the unifying factor in all of this is me.  I just don't have the brain capacity to deal with the more technical side of linguistics.

I mentioned earlier in this review that part of the reason I tried so hard to make my way through this book was just vanity.  I wanted to be seen as one of the smart people.  

That vanity may have been forgivable 12 years ago (when I first ordered this book).  But now that I'm older, that vanity is just looking silly.  Now that I'm on the wrong side of 40, it's looking less and less likely that I'm going to become a brilliant scholar in linguistics.  Better to just stay in my lane.  I'm an ESL teacher--I should read books that are actually useful in the ESL classroom.  (Like The Grammar Book--which, by the way, I fully intend to come back to.)

So, I'm going to hang up my hat, and give up trying to understand Chomsky or Universal Grammar or anything on the more technical side of linguistics, and focus my professional development reading on stuff that's about the ESL classroom.  

...after one more book.

You see, I've already bought (on my sister's recommendation) The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris, which is about Chomsky and his rivals, and it's currently sitting on my bookshelf.  And I've heard from a couple people (my sister included) that it's quite interesting, and integrates some of the gossipy history of the field with the linguistic theory.  And so I've already decided that I'm going to read that one next. 

Flipping through it, it does look like the book gets a little bit technical, but I've already decided I want to give it a go.

So The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris is next.  And then after that, no more books on Chomsky's grammar.

Footnotes (docs, pub)
(*1) TESOL: Same disclaimer I've made previously on this blog--there are so many competing acronyms to describe the job of teaching English: TESOL, ELT, ESL, TEFL, TESL, etc.  I'm just going to pick one for the sake of this review.

(*2) On The Folly of Wanting to Know More About Chomsky's Linguistic Theories Because of My Admiration for His Political Work: It's a stupid reason, but I suspect I'm in good company on this.  I think a lot of people are curious about Chomsky's linguistic theories because of their interest in his political writings.  In fact it's often been speculated (particularly by Chomsky's critics) that admiration for his political work has been one of the reasons he has maintained somewhat of a cult status in linguistics--Tom Wolfe was of this opinion in The Kingdom of Speech.

(*3) On Thinking that this Book Would Improve my Knowledge of English Grammar Rules: Although, spoiler alert, it didn't help me with my grammar knowledge at all.  At least nothing I can ever use in the ESL classroom.  The level of abstraction that this book deals with is not at all useful for the kinds of questions my students have about English grammar.

(*4) On All the Linguistics and TESOL Books I've Read over the Last 10 Years: Looking over the list of all the linguistic books I've read in the past 10 years, it's a decent sized list, but I still can't help feeling it's not as big a list as it should be.  Especially since, as I've mentioned, I've been trying to become an expert in this field since doing my Masters.  Why haven't I read more?
The reasons for this are 2-fold.  One reason is that I'm not very good at disciplining myself and reading more (as I lament every year).  The second reason is that since the books I read for professional development are not inherently interesting for me to read, I'm relying purely on a sense of duty or external motivation to get through these books, and this motivation comes and goes.  I'll have periods when I'll feel motivated to read linguistic books, and periods when I just read for pleasure.  
No doubt, if I had been a more disciplined person over the past 10 years, I'd be a lot more knowledgeable about my field now, and perhaps this would have lead to more professional advancement.

Or... perhaps not.  Who knows?  For one thing it's always questionable how much these books help you in the industry.  For another thing, I don't retain all of what I read anyway.  A lot of the books I've read on linguistics or language learning over the past 10 years I now remember very little of.  

(*5) On Freddie deBoer's Blogpost Encouraging People to Try to Read Above Their Current Level: I can't give you the link because Freddie deBoer has since deleted his old blog.
By the way, there's a contrary opinion by Steve Donoghue (in one of his many booktube videos) in which he says that you should choose books to read that are at your level, and you don't get any points for trying to read something more advanced than you're ready for.  (I can't find the link for that video either.  Steve Donoghue cranks out so many videos every week, I can't possibly search through his archive to remember which video he said it on.  But it was one of them.)  After my experience grinding my way through this Chomsky book, in which I understood very little of the second half of the book and didn't enjoy it at all, I think I've gone over to the side of Steve Donoghue on this question--it's better to try to read at your level.

(*6) On all the Reasons It Took Me So Long to Finish This Book: In my recent review of Don Quixote, I apologized for having taken 3 years to finish the book, and gave a long list of excuses as to why it's been difficult to find time to read the past 3 years.  All of those excuses apply equally to Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction as well.

(*7) On the idea that at least the authors give you fair warning about the technical nature of the book: Actually if I could complain about this for a second, the truth is that for a new reader, the messages are mixed.
The back cover contains a blurb by Steven Franks of Indiana University:

"Cook and Newsom have written an extremely clear and highly comprehensible introduction to current syntactic theory.  This text makes accessible many subtleties of linguistic argumentation, and explains in plain English the reasoning involved..."

Excuse me? extremely clear? high comprehensible? accessible? plain English? Oh, I would beg to differ professor.  (To be fair, I suspect "highly comprehensible" has a different meaning in graduate schools than it does to the general public, and this book is clearly designed as a text for graduate students.)

But okay, that's just the blurb on the back cover chosen by the publishers.  The authors aren't responsible for that.  They explicitly warn the reader on pages 41-42 that non-technical readers are going to struggle through chapters 4-9.

Except...on the very first page of the opening chapter, they state:

This book is intended chiefly as an introduction for those who want to have a broad overview of the theory with sufficient detail to see how its main concepts work, rather than for those who are specialist students of syntax, for whom technical introductions such as Haegeman (1994) and Ouhalla (1994) are more appropriate. (from page 1)

...and yet, on page 42, they warn that non-technical readers should only read chapters 1-3, and only specialists can continue to chapters 4-8.  So which is it?

 
(*8) The Paragraph I couldn't understand on page 202:  I suppose I should probably give the paragraph so that you know what I'm talking about, huh?

But how does this make wh-items move to the specifier of CP?  To explain this, we need to introduce two mechanisms.  The first may be called the Wh-Criterion, after Rizzi (1991), which states:

all [+Wh] complementizers must contain a [+Wh] element

(This is not in fact Rizzi's own formulation of the Wh-Criterion, but is more similar to a principle proposed by Aoun et al. (1981).) While this is obviously satisfied when there is a [+Wh] complementizer such as whether in head position, it does raise the problem of how the Wh-Crition can be satisfied by wh-movment, which moves a wh-word into the specifier of CP, not the head position.  This is where the second mechanism comes in, namely specifier-head agreement, abbreviated to spec/head agreement.  This accounts for a set of phenomena where there is agreement between the head of a phrase X and the element which occupies the specifier of that phrase, specifier of XP. For example, the subject of a finite clause sits in the specifier position of AGRP and it 'agrees' with the head of AGR in that they must have the same nominal features of person, number and gender.  If this relationship between specifier and head is universal and so applicable to all phrases, the specifier of CP will also agree with the head C in that both will share the [+-Wh] feature. Now, if a wh-item moves into a [+Wh] specifier of CP, this will be enough to satisfy the Wh-Criterion as, although the complementizer position itself may not contain a [+Wh] element, the specifier with which it agrees does contain such an element.  So the Wh-Criterion is satisfied either by the head complementizer of the CP having [+Wh] or by the [+Wh] of the specifier of CP migrating to the head via spec/head agreement.  (p.202--italics and bold in the original)

(*9) The two paragraphs on page 262 that I complained about not understanding even after reading multiple times and giving me a headache: I'd better quote these as well, huh?  You can make up your own mind.

Returning to the cases of movement from subject position, as this position is not governed by a lexical head, the question is what properly governs traces here? Chomsky (1981a) assumed that the notion of governor is extended in this case to include elements which are co-indexed with the governee and that this extension of governor is also relevant for proper government. Thus a trace will be properly governed, in this instance, if it is governed by an element that it is co-indexed with, i.e. the moved element or one of the other traces left behind by the moved element. This relationship is often called antecedent government and is contrasted with head government.

This clearly helps us to account for the that-trace phenomenon.  In the absence of a that complementizer, the trace in the specifier of CP properly governs a trace in subject position.  However, when there is a complementizer present, this must interfere with the process of antecedent government, thus making the original trace non-properly governed and in violation of the ECP.  Intuitively we can view the situation from the notion that government should be a unique relationship such that if one element governs another, then the governed element should not also be governed by anything else.  The appearance of the complementizer blocks antecedent government because it adds a nearer potential governor (the complementizer) but, as this is not a proper governor, the original trace will violate the ECP.  (The first 2 paragraphs from age 262.  Bold and italics in the original)

 (*10) On not Appreciating How Much Free Time I had Back in July 2020: The other thing I started back in July 2020 was trying to learn multiple languages on Duolingo.  I had been studying Vietnamese, but I decided that I couldn't really hope to truly understand Chomsky's Universal Grammar unless I had a working knowledge of several different languages.  So I started reviewing Japanese on Duolingo, trying to go back to my high school Latin, and adding in French, Spanish and even German.  At the time, I thought this would be my new normal.  (That is, I thought I would keep it going for many years, and then in 10 years time I could be a multi-lingual guy.)  But once I got busy again, I had to drop trying to do everything on Duolingo.

 (*11) On Temporarily Shelving The Grammar Book: I haven't abandoned it.  It's still listed in my Currently Reading column.  But I've temporarily shelved it until I can finish some other books, and then I'll come back to it.

(*12) On Just Trying to Plow through the Book and Finish in in November 2020: The other disadvantage that I was operating under was that I was constantly sleep deprived during this period.  I was teaching a lot of hours spread out over 3 jobs.  I was working the morning shift, so I was up early every morning.  And I had a fussy toddler who didn't want to go to bed on time at home.  So I seldom got a full night's sleep.  And this affected how I engaged with the book.  I'm not sure it affected how much I was understanding it.  (I wasn't understanding it even before I became sleep deprived.)  But it definitely affected how willing I was to try to concentrate on and wrestle with paragraphs I wasn't understanding.  I just didn't have the energy for it.
Again, I thought about delaying this book until I had more free time, but... when was I ever going to have more free time?  This is my life.  I'm middle-aged, I have a child to take care of, and I have to earn money at work.  There was nothing for it but to just keep struggling and trying to finish the book off, even if I wasn't understanding much of the last chapters.

(*13) On Re-reading this Book: So between reading it, and now trying to re-read it, I've been carrying this book around with me for over a year at this point.  And I should mention it's beginning to cause me some embarrassment at work.  At first, everyone was very impressed that I was trying to tackle Chomsky's grammar.  And I had to constantly tell people, "Well, yes, it is true that I'm reading this book.  But I'm actually understanding very little of it."  And then I had to go on to explain that I am actually a person of very limited intelligence, and that this book is much too intellectual for me, etc.
["Well if it's any consolation," one of my colleagues told me over lunch, "That kind of book will be of absolutely no help to you in the ESL classroom anyway."  And of course he's absolutely right.]
Now that's it's been over a year and I'm still carrying this book around with me, I'm starting to get questions about what I'm still doing with this book.  I've started trying to hide the book when I take it down to the coffee shop at lunch break.

(*14) Examples of When I Thought the Wrong Word had been Written by Mistake: There were actually several of these, but here's one example from page 245:

In the case of ECM structures, where there is no CP to prevent government of the subject from outside the clause, the Verb will indeed be able to assign the Accusative Case to the subject.

In the margins, I wrote: "prevent? It should be allow, no?
Now, I realize I took this all completely out of context, and so no one has a chance of judging whether or not I'm write without reading the whole page.  But I mention this to illustrate the type of thing I mean.  I could have sworn that the above sentence should have read "allow government" instead of "prevent government".  But is this a typo?  Or am I just too stupid to understand this book? 

(*15) I couldn't find any negative reviews: That is to say, I couldn't find any negative reviews on stylistic grounds.  There were some anti-Chomskyans who objected to its content.  Such as this guy here:

A load of bunk, Chomsky made shit up as he went along. Nobody is hardwired with universal grammar. In fact, all humans have the intrinsic need to communicate, which in turn is shaped by their linguistic environment. Simply put, people want to communicate and they will always find a way to do so regardless. Doubt my point? Go to Thailand and watch a Thai person with the knowledge of only 10 English words get their point across to a Western tourist.

 Oh man... Could it be any more obvious that this guy did not even bother reading the book?  Well, welcome to Internet commentary!

(*16) I'm not that smart: You know, I've been out of school for so long, I think I've forgotten that I was never a super-star student.  I was a good student--a solid B+ student.  But I was never one of the superstars.
I did very well in history.  (I got As in history).  And I did well in literature classes--at least I did well in literature back in high school when literature was about books with straightforward simple narratives.  (I did less well in college when I had to struggle with analyzing difficult texts.)  But science was always my worst subject--my grades in science were usually B/B-.  
In the years since I finished school, when I've been able to pursue my own interests at my own pace, I've cultivated an image of myself as an intellectual.  But the truth is, I was always a B student.

Weekly Reading Vlogs:
April 11, 2021  Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction 0-78 pages  
April 18, 2021 Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction  p.78-90
April 25, 2021 Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction  p.90-116
May 2, 2021 Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction p.116-118

Video Review (Playlist HERE)
Video Review HERE and embedded below:

Link of the Day
Language Design - Noam Chomsky / Serious Science