The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language by Christine Kenneally

against him. Chomsky’s casual hunches and suppositions were often treated—and debated—as though he had made a fully defended argument. 26
    Certainly, Chomsky’s terminology changed considerably over the years, and this must have contributed to his being misunderstood. In 1972 he referred to his developing ideas about language and the mind as the standard theory. In 1977 the standard theory became the extended standard theory, and later it became the revised extended standard theory. In the early 1980s Chomskyan linguistics was called principles and parameters theory, and then later government-binding theory. Over time, transformations were transformed into T-markers; phrase structure representations became P-markers. Instead of deep structure, surface structure, and logical form, linguists had D-structure, S-structure, and LF. Theta-theory described the assignment of roles like agent to noun phrases.
    Some of the name changes marked big shifts in ideas. For example, in the earliest theories of UG, children were born with innate, very specific rules for languages. In the principles and parameters theory, children are born with a finite set of parameters for language that their experience of a particular language then modifies. So the differences in the syntax of different languages can be reduced to this collection of settings. Overall, though the many shifts make it hard to imagine that more than a few syntacticians can really track all the distinctions between them, a vision of language has remained consistent for all this time. Chomsky emphasized repeatedly both the complex nature of language and the fact that the human brain was especially designed to acquire and to implement it. As he wrote in 1975: “A human language is a system of remarkable complexity. To come to know a human language would be an extraordinary achievement for a creature not specifically designed to accomplish this task. A normal child acquires this knowledge on relatively slight exposure and without specific training. He can then quite effortlessly make use of an intricate structure of specific rules and guiding principles to convey his thoughts and feelings to others, arousing in them novel ideas and subtle perceptions and judgments. 27
    Declaring the revolution over turned out to be premature, and the downturn in the fortunes of generative linguistics was merely a blip. Just a few years after Chomskyan linguistics was supposed to be over, barely anyone remembered that it had been in peril. People continued to wax superlative at the mention of Chomsky’s name, and comparisons to the great men of intellectual history kept rolling out: He was the Newton, the Einstein, of language. He was an intellectual colossus, a special kind of genius that made the merely normal geniuses look dim-witted. Not only did Chomsky’s influence reassert itself, but in 1980 Charles Hockett complained of his “eclipsing stance.” By now people didn’t just think Chomsky’s ideas were the most important thing in linguistics; they had begun to believe that nothing important had ever happened before Chomsky.
    Writing about the many problems for Chomskyan theory in the 1980s that were simply ignored, the linguist and historian Peter Matthews likened the advance of generative linguistics in that period to the German army’s march across France in World War II. (After World War I, the French built a huge fortification on the French-German border called the Maginot Line. When the Germans invaded France in World War II, they basically went around the fortification by going through Belgium, and from there they entered France unimpeded.) 28 Students continued to be attracted to Chomsky’s work. One way of measuring the power of an academic is to count his intellectual children, the students he influences who leave the university, get jobs on other campuses and in other countries, and continue to teach the ideas of the teacher. These students’ students become teachers