Why read The Linguistics Wars?

Book cover of The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff, and the Battle over Deep Structure

Book description

An updated and expanded history of the field of linguistics from the 1950s to the current day

The Linguistics Wars tells the tumultuous history of language and cognition studies from the rise of Noam Chomsky's Transformational Grammar to the current day. Focusing on the rupture that split the field between…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Linguistics Wars as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Paul Thagard

Author

Randy Harris is a colleague of mine at the University of Waterloo, and his book is a marvelous history and analysis of the decades-long intellectual battle between Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff. It provides the context and background for how Lakoff’s theory of metaphor was part of the development of alternatives to Chomsky-style linguistics, along with some trenchant criticisms of the very idea of conceptual metaphor.

From Paul's list on The best books on metaphor.