logicandlanguage.net

This is tricky, because the history of linguistics is fairly strongly politicised in some respects, so it's hard to get a neutral take on what exactly happened to generative semantics. Anyway, I'd start with Frederick Newmeyer's stuff (either his 1980/1986 book "Linguistic Theory in America" or his more recent collection of papers "Generative Linguistics") but be prepared to look at other stuff, such as the Goldsmith and Huck volume he critically reviews, to get the other side of the story.

I don't but someone dropped an article entitled "Leonard Bloomfield: Lingusitics and mathematics" on my desk a while ago. It's all about the influence of Hilbert and the Vienna Circle on linguisitics, and it's from the journal Historiographia Linguistica. Maybe you'll find something there: http://www.benjamins.nl/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=hl

i think this could be useful for you:

Campbell, Lyle, 2001, 'The history of linguistics', in Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller, eds., The Handbook of Linguistics, Oxford: Blackwell, 81-104.

this site is good:

http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/search/search-all-static17294.html?CFID=4709586&CFTOKEN=88336842

cheers,

There's a book I noticed on a friend's bookshelf about a year and a half back that I've been meaning to check out called "The Linguistics Wars" by Randy Harris (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019509834X/), which seems to discuess specifically the conflict that Brian mentions. The book review already gives a brief summary. Though it calls the book "even-handed", it seems to continue in a not-so-even-handed way.

A book that I read a few years ago is "Schools of Linguistics", by Geoffrey Sampson (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804711259/). I don't remember too much about it, but it's a relatively short history that seems to go perhaps from 1800 to 1980.

At any rate, if someone does find a 5-10 page resource for you, share it with the rest of us!

The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.) has just come out. No doubt its bazillion entries include relevant historical stuff. Perhaps your library has subscribed to the on-line version.

This may be of some help:

http://www.msu.edu/user/abbottb/formal.htm

The formal approach to meaning:
Formal semantics and its recent developments
by Barbara Abbott

Thanks for posting everyone - I'll check those suggestions out.

To give you a professional advice, I firstly recommend that you specify what you want. If you want to see something Chomsky’s work or Generative Linguistics, references about Bloomfield, de Saussure or Structuralism will consume your time and will not help.

Then, I suggest you to consider whether you really want to read about the History of Generative Linguistics or read an introduction to Generative theory. The references above, Newmeyer's and Campbell’s books are ok. But if you really want to go through the time tunnel, I would suggest Lyons’ most famous book on the ideas of Noam Chomsky. Lyons’ introductory work ‘Language and Linguistics’ brings a short history of the major schools during the XXth. Any Book that served as an introduction to Transformational Grammar or to Government Binding might contain a concise History of Generative Grammar.

(But I must make a warning: some books confuse the definition of recursion with that of ‘generative’. Recursion is a property of all human languages: you make an infinite use of a finite set of linguistic units. Unlike what the term suggests, a grammar is called generative, NOT because it ‘generates’ (infinite) sentences. A Generative Grammar is a formalised Grammar that is sufficiently explicit. Confusion between these terms was often common years ago.)

However, the pest presentation of Chomsky’s ideas is still the first two chapters of his very book ‘Knowledge of Language : Its Nature, Origins, and Use’.

Now, if you are interested in recent trends, check Uriagereka’s ‘Rhyme and Reason: An Introduction to Minimalist Syntax’. Radford’s ‘Minimalist Syntax : Exploring the Structure of English’ and Lasnik’s ‘A Course In Minimalist Syntax: Foundations and Prospects’. For a second opinion, see Jackendoff’s ‘Foundations of Language : Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution’ and his book with Culicover ‘Simpler Syntax’.