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Has There Been a ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ in Linguistics?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Frederick J. Newmeyer
Frederick J. Newmeyer*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Abstract

While it was once uncontroversial to refer to a ‘Chomskyan revolution’ in linguistics, a number of commentators have recently questioned whether generativist theory truly represents a revolutionary departure from earlier approaches. This paper defends the view that a Chomskyan revolution has indeed occurred—a revolution which began with the publication of Syntactic structures (1957) and which has had profound effects, both intellectually for the study of language and sociologically for the field of linguistics. Paradoxically, however, the revolutionary success of generative grammarians has not resulted in their achieving ADMINISTRATIVE power in the field—a fact which is both documented and explained.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 62 , Issue 1 , March 1986, pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Joseph Emonds, James McCawley, Sol Saporta, William Bright, Keith Percival, David Lightfoot, Geoffrey Pullum, Noam Chomsky, Patricia Keating, and Richard Ogle for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper. It goes without saying that they bear no responsibility for errors of either fact or interpretation.

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