> It is rather surprising that more has not been done this year (thus far, anyway) to commemorate a significant semicentenary: the 50th anniversary of what could reasonably be called the most influential linguistics book of the 20th century.
Linguistics as a field is in a post-Chomsky hangover and none-too-happy to celebrate the man that put them there. Chomsky's many years as the dominant voice in the field were traumatic for linguistics. Once a decade or so he would promulgate The New Way of doing syntax, handed down from on high from this very influential man, which meant incredible disruption not only for syntacticians but also for those working in semantics and morphology/phonology.
Much of Chomsky's influence came not from his intellect (though that was surely prodigious) but from his forceful personality. His will to publicly ridicule not only opposing ideas but opposing personalities was a big part of his rise and continuing dominance. Linguistics was a nasty place to work for a long time. (See "The Linguistics Wars").
Now that he's not actively working to maintain it, Chomsky's academic reputation has suffered substantially and the field is largely trying to move on. Large-scale corpora and computational capabilities enable more empiricist rather than rationalist approaches to human language, which has made the argumentation less personal and more productive.
Linguistics as a field is in a post-Chomsky hangover and none-too-happy to celebrate the man that put them there. Chomsky's many years as the dominant voice in the field were traumatic for linguistics. Once a decade or so he would promulgate The New Way of doing syntax, handed down from on high from this very influential man, which meant incredible disruption not only for syntacticians but also for those working in semantics and morphology/phonology.
Much of Chomsky's influence came not from his intellect (though that was surely prodigious) but from his forceful personality. His will to publicly ridicule not only opposing ideas but opposing personalities was a big part of his rise and continuing dominance. Linguistics was a nasty place to work for a long time. (See "The Linguistics Wars").
Now that he's not actively working to maintain it, Chomsky's academic reputation has suffered substantially and the field is largely trying to move on. Large-scale corpora and computational capabilities enable more empiricist rather than rationalist approaches to human language, which has made the argumentation less personal and more productive.
At least, that's my take.