Koerner assembles seven previously published essays on the history of American linguistics, adding remarks "in lieu of a conclusion" (p. 285) and new pieces on historiography, generative semantics, and morphophonemics. He writes as an outsider, a European whose training in linguistics predisposed him to explore his discipline as well as its subject matter historically and reflexively. Koerner remains ambivalent about American culture, of which he sees American linguistics as both illustration and product. He finds Americans "utilitarian," "forward-looking, traditionally optimistic ... and somewhat naive" (p. 1), uninterested in method and epistemology as well as disciplinary history. Despite these absences, Koerner's various essays assemble a considerable record of historiographic scholarship on American linguistics by American linguists.
There are analytic gems as well as bibliographic detail. Koerner shows that Leonard Bloomfield read Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique generale in 1923, although many of his students did not. Noam Chomsky used the Cours in different ways at different stages of his career, although each reading differed from Bloomfield's. Chomsky's cavalier willingness to reread his own intellectual history and the "counter-history" presented by his former students challenges the historiographer of influences on his work. In Koerner's view, avoidance of meaning sidetracked American structuralism (which did not need Saussure to move from historical to synchronic approaches). He argues that morphophonemics, usually associated with structuralism, persisted in early Chomskian analysis.
Koerner revisits the debate on sources of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, updating his own position in response to John Joseph, Regna Darnell, and others. He concludes that Whorf knew the German tradition of Herder, Humboldt, etc., through his teacher Edward Sapir. The "Humboldtian world-view idea" is broadly defined and widely applied to American anthropology and linguistics. Its distinctive features include study of grammatical categories of non-Indo-European languages, typological rather than historical classification, semantics and psychology of language, and "the relationship between language structure and social and cultural organization" (p. 47).
Koerner has his own axes to grind, and they are reflected in his choice of historiographic topics. He is not a fan of Chomsky's "socially unredeeming and linguistically non-empirical work" (p. 274) and discusses generative semantics as an internal and Labovian sociolinguistics as an external "antidote" to the dominant paradigm of his own career as a linguist. Nonetheless, he acknowledges a "scientific revolution" in American linguistics (and beyond) since Chomsky. That revolution, however, owes much to the self-conscious rhetoric of discontinuity employed by Chomsky and his early students-for example, insistence that their work was unappreciated, though archival records document its rapid success (which Koerner dates to the Ninth International Congress of Linguists in Cambridge in 1962).
The "rise and fall" of generative semantics (GS; p. 105) briefly provided an alternative to Chomsky's interpretive syntax (and its various successors). But GS lacked organizational resources and failed to mount a rhetoric against the M.I.T. mainstream around Chomsky. Koerner is strangely dismissive of Robin Lakoff, seeing her as a non-core participant in GS whose "insider status provides a great deal [of] material for a history that could one day be