I entered college in fall 2003, planning to major in psychology, but quickly fell in love with an introductory linguistics class taken to fulfill a general education requirement. I didn’t realize it at time, but in retrospect I think that the early “aughts” represented a time of reaction, in the political sense, to generative grammar (GG). A huge portion of the discourse of that era (roughly 2003-2010, and becoming more pronounced later in the decade) was dominated by debates oriented around opposition to GG. This includes:

• Pullum & Scholz’s (2002) critique of poverty of the stimulus arguments,
• various attempts to revive the past tense debate (e.g, Pinker 2006),
• Evans & Levinson (2009) on “the myth of language universals”,
• Gibson & Fedorenko (2010) on “weak quantitative standards”, and
• the Pirahã recursion affair.

And there are probably others I can’t recall at present. In my opinion, very little was learned from any of these studies. In particular the work of Pullum & Scholz, Gibson & Fedorenko, and Everett falls apart with careful empirical scrutiny; for which see Legate & Yang 2002, the work of Jon Sprouse and colleagues, and Nevins et al. 2009, respectively; few seem to have been convinced by Pinker or Evans & Levinson. It is something of a surprise to me that these highly-contentious debates, some of which was even covered in the popular press, are now rarely read by young scholars.

I don’t know why opposition to GG was so stiff at the time but I do have a theory. The aughts were essentially an apocalyptic era, culturally and materially, and the crucial event of the decade is the invasion of Iraq by a US-led coalition. The invasion represented a failure of elites: it lacked a coherent political justification legible to the rest of the world, resulted in massive civilian casualties, and lead to institutional failures at home and nuclear proliferation abroad. And there are still-powerful voices in linguistics, intellectuals who have a responsibility “to speak the truth and to expose lies”, who were paid handsomely to manufacture consent for the Iraq war. In that context, it is not surprising that the received wisdom of GG, perceived as hegemonic and culturally associated with the anti-war left, came under heavy attack.

References

Evans, N., and Levinson, S.C. 2009. The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral & Brain Sciences 32: 429-492.
Gibson, E., and Fedorenko, E. 2010. Weak quantitative standards in linguistics research. Trends in Cognitive Science 14: P223-234.
Legate, J. A., and Yang, C. D. 2002. Empirical re-assessment of stimulus poverty arguments. The Linguistic Review 19: 151-162.
Nevins, A., Pesetsky, D., and Rodrigues, C. 2009. Pirahã exceptionality: a reassessment. Language 85: 355-4040.
Pinker, S. 2006. Whatever happened to the past tense debate? In Baković, E., Ito, J, and McCarthy, J. J. (ed.), Wondering at the Natural Fecundity of Things: Essays in Honor of Alan Prince, pages 221-238. BookSurge.
Pullum, G., and Scholz, B. 2002. Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments. The Linguistic Review 19: 9-50.