Abstract

This paper contests the view that the events which have taken place in linguistics following the syntactic theories of N. Chomsky conform to the pattern of scientific development described in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Specifically, it is argued that neither Kuhn's claims about the nature of 'normal science', nor those about the necessity of crisis preceding periods of revolutionary change, nor those about 'paradigms' succeeding one another in the history of a science, find any confirmation in the case of the generative revolution in linguistics