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Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution (precis)

In the 1960s, when I became a graduate student in linguistics, generative grammar was the hot new topic. Everyone from philosophers to psychologists to anthropologists to educators to literary theorists was reading about transformational grammar. But by the late 1970s, the bloom was off the rose, although most linguists didn’t realize it; and by the 1990s, linguistics was arguably far on the periphery of the action in cognitive science. To some extent, of course, such a decline in fortune was simply a matter of fashion and the arrival of new methodologies such as connectionism and brain imaging. However, there are deeper reasons for linguistics’ loss of prestige, some historical and some scientific.