Antilinguistics - a critical assessment of modern linguistic theory and practice

One danger attendant upon reviewing a book as bad as this knuckle-headed assault on linguists and all they stand for is that one may inadvertently suggest by the length and vehemence of one's commentary that the book is worthy of extended discussion. Another is that by quoting the most strikingly absurd parts of the book the review might give an exaggerated sense of its entertainment value (this is not really a funny book, despite a few howlers). Yet perhaps a brief comment is called for, lest silence imply assent. I would not dissent from the claim that there is plenty to be criticized in the present state of linguistics. The unjustified pretentions of much generative grammar and the inadequacies of some of its woeful attempts at description merit harsh criticism-maybe even as harsh as the sort of ridicule and cruelty that I dispense elsewhere (Pullum 1991). But there is no utility in a purported challenge to a whole discipline written by someone who deals in naive panaceas and seems unable to understand the primary literature. The production of this book is bad enough to make one suspect an amateur job: the page layout is often bad, the style is often awkward, and there are signs of carelessness (for example, beyond p. 180 every page number the index gives is incorrect). But the content is far worse. Sophomoric blunders abound: underlying constituent order confused with what speakers "start with ... in their heads" and surface structure with "what they actually say" (p. 30); innate general language acquisition mechanisms confused with innate rules for English grammar (p. 46); uncomprehended formulae botched (the arrowless "transformation" on p. 23, for example); well-known names are wrong ("Deidre Wilson," pp. 28, 275; "James Fodor," p. 195n; etc.); in a book on this level it is no surprise to find the old chestnut about the Eskimos' many words for snow turning up yet again (p. 221). Gethin argues that modern linguistics is a jumble of cabalistic nonsense, and can be swept away by the simple truth that the key to everything is meaning. Language acquisition is no puzzle: people learn meanings "by observation and imitation," and they "join individual meanings together so that they make larger meanings" (p. 9). That is all one needs to know about language; but modern linguists are afflicted with a "systematizing mania that pretends to discover new profundity in what everybody knows already" (pp. 11-12); they fail to see that "there is no such thing as structure in language" (p. 93). "There is no mystery" (p. 108), there is only meaning. The targets of the book's ad hominem attacks include not only (of course) Noam Chomsky, but also an odd assortment of popularizers and interpreters. In fact, the bibliography is almost entirely restricted to secondary and tertiary sources like magazine articles, radio interviews, and pop science books, which exacerbates misreadings (see e.g.p. 187, where Gethin discusses a paraphrase by Jeremy Campbell of some remarks