What is the role of meaning in grammar? In the late 1960s and early 1970s the question split the linguistics community and separated Noam Chomsky from some of his most prized students. In Ideology and Linguistic Theory Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith provide a revisionist account of the development of ideas about semantics in modern theories of language, focusing particularly on Chomsky's very public rift with the Generative Semanticists about the concept of Deep Structure.

Despite the eventual triumph of Chomsky's theory of interpretive Semantics, the authors argue that many of the central issues raised in the debates in fact have never been resolved. At the same time, they show through detailed analysis of the principal theoretical arguments how and why the theories were far more compatible than has ever been generally assumed.

Supplemented by extended interviews with four of the original participants in the debates, this book provides an incisive appraisal of the paradigm which has dominated American linguistics for the last thirty years. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the study of language and mind or the history of the human sciences.