A post-Bloomfieldian’s last stand: Charles Hockett’s attempt to resign from the LSA in 1982

Abstract

ABSTRACT Charles Hockett had been one of the leading American linguists in the period between Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky, that is, throughout much of the 1940s and 1950s. His empiricist outlook on linguistic theorising led him to principled disagreements with Chomsky’s generative grammar, which by the mid-1960s he saw as dominating American linguistics and its principal organisation, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). In 1982, spurred by the announcement of a fund drive in support of the Society’s activities, he sent LSA Secretary-Treasurer Victoria Fromkin a letter of resignation. This paper documents the reaction of some of the leading members of the Society to Hockett’s letter, availing itself of previously unpublished correspondence.