Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Paul Postal is a veteran of formal linguistics, involved both in early generative-tranformational grammar and relational grammar. He has expressed his dissent from maistream generative linguistics in articles and books many times in the last twenty years, but this book is likely to collect and summarize his critiques in the most readable way.
The first part is technical. Here Postal criticizes some current analysis of English syntactic phenomena, and suggests more adequate alternatives. Passives, parasitic gaps and raising are some of the subjects discussed here.
The second part is a purely polemical one, where Postal addresses the rethoric and academic conduct of mainstream generative linguistics and accuses it of fuzziness and intellectual dishonesty.
I must admit I have just been reading some of the book this week. I have not studied in depth the technical contributions. Anyway, I want to make clear that Postal's scientific erudition is huge, and therefore his technical contribuitions are highly welcome, no matter how "old-fashioned" they are supposed to be.
As far as polemics is concerned, I have a mixed feeling. On one hand, I find the style a bit too harsh. Calling other people's linguistics "junk linguistics" is a bit like calling a conservative a "fascist" or a socialist a "stalinist": it does not help to carry the debate on. On the other hand, some very interesting points are made, for instance about claims of "virtual conceptual necessity" in the Minimalist Program, or the abuse of locutions like "it can be proven that X (but I won't prove it...)" and others.
That said, what I find really perplexing has not (directly) to do with this book, but with another one: Horowitz's "Chomsky Anti-Reader". There is included an article by Postal and Levine wiich make more ore less the same polemical points about chomskyan linguistics.
My question is the following: how could have two serious scholars like Postal and Levine accepted to pubish in a collection full of right-wing propaganda and moral defamation? Skepticism should not be confused with cynicism!
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This volume consists of an introduction and two groups of essays by Paul M. Postal, each with a connecting theme. The first, positive group of papers, contains five previously unpublished studies of English syntax. These include a long study of so-called "locative inversion," two investigations related to raising to non-subject status, an argument for the existence of a hitherto ignored nominal grammatical category and a study of vulgar negative polarity items. Each investigation of specific English details is argued to have significant theoretical consequences. The second, negative group of papers, contains seven essays each of which seeks to show that aspects of contemporary linguistic activity are in part contaminated by elements of what is called "junk linguistics." Postal uses the term to denote work which advances proposals, puts forward claims and asserts deep results which, he argues, can only be accepted by ignoring serious standards of inquiry and scholarship. Postal claims that much of this work is nonetheless currently considered not only serious but prestigious reveals the problem to exist at the core of the field, not its periphery. These chapters include documentation of "junk linguistic" aspects in National Science Foundation refereeing, work on the foundations of linguistics, and even in widespread terminological usages. The final chapter briefly lists personal suggestions for dealing with this problem.
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