Generativism and anti-linguistics

I strongly identify with the generativist program. I recognize and accept that there are other ways to study language; some of these (e.g., any reasonably careful documentary work) contribute to generativist discourse and many of those that don’t are still prosocial. I for one would love to see the humanist aspect of documentation get more recognition. (Why don’t humanities programs hire linguists engaged in documentation and translation efforts?) But I’m most interested in the scientific aspects of language and think that generativism basically encompasses the big questions in this area, and some of the questions it doesn’t encompass just aren’t very important.

I don’t think it’s really ideal to brand generativism as Chomskyanism, which is the term anti-generativists tend to use. Certainly Chomsky is the plurality contributor to the program, but I think it gives undue credit to a single individual when there are so many others worth recognizing. I suspect the reason anti-generativists prefer it is they tend to see generativism as a cult of personality and perhaps want to trade on the repute of Chomsky’s (admittedly, extremely idiosyncratic but conceptually unrelated) political commitments. In evolutionary biology, it is common to refer to the modern theory of natural as the neo-Darwinian synthesis or modern synthesis. This makes sense because in 2024 there are no “strict Darwinists”, since subsequent work has integrated his monumental contributions with Mendelian and molecular genetics. Similarly, linguistics has no “strict Chomskyans”, even though we linguists eagerly awake our Mendel and our Crick & Watson.

The thing that sticks with me about the anti-generativist contingent is how disunited and disorganized they are. Anti-generativists are mostly a sincere lot (generativists too), but their attitudes are greatly shaped by negative polarization and as such, they have strange bedfellows. On the anti-generativist internet, you’ll see Adorno-disciple social constructivists talking at cross-purposes with construction grammarians, self-identified leftist/radical sociolinguists palling around with neocon consent-manufacturing journalists, experimental psycholinguists who reserve all their respect for exactly one out-of-practice fieldworker, tensorbros who don’t read books, and a few really mad, really old Boomers who never managed to build a movement around their heresy. By all accounts these people ought to hate each other. (And maybe, deep down, they do.)

In the worst case these conservations tend to veer away from constructive critique to a kind of anti-linguistics which devalues any form of language analysis that isn’t legible either as social activism or white-coat-wearing lab science. I for one can’t take your opinion about the science of language seriously if you can’t do the “armchair linguistics” that forms the descriptive-empirical base of the field. There are anti-generativists who clear this low bar, but not many. You don’t have to be a genius to do linguistics, but you do sort of have to be a linguist.

In my opinion, generativism has ever been hegemonic beyond the level of individual departments, and claims otherwise are simply scurrilous. (Even MIT is a hotbed of anti-generativist reaction, after all.) But I think it would be a shame for college students to get a liberal arts education without learning about these very interesting ideas about human nature (in addition to standard consciousness-raising about prescriptivism and language ideology, which is important too.)