More on gatekeepers and Noam Chomsky's writings of the 1950s

Stephen O. Murray
El Instituto Obregón, San Francisco
Summary

According to the author’s findings, the only rejection of an article that Noam Chomsky submitted to a linguistics journal came from the senior editor of Word, André Martinet (1908–1999), who was an adamant foe of neo-Bloomfieldianism, while leading neo-Bloomfieldians, particularly the key gatekeeper, Bernard Bloch (1907–1965), the editor of Language, welcomed his early work and a momentous explication of it by Robert B. Lees (1922–1996). The present paper reveals documentary evidence that the alleged ‘main work’ that ‘couldn’t get published’ was actively sought by at least two book publishers early on, and that if it was blocked, it was blocked by Chomsky’s failure to deliver the contracted manuscript of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT) at the time.

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