By mid-twentieth century, a working consensus had been reached in the linguistics community, based on the great achievements of preceding years. Synchronic linguistics had been established as a science, a “taxonomic” science, with sophisticated procedures of analysis of data. Taxonomic science has limits. It does not ask “why?” The time was ripe to seek explanatory theories, using insights provided by the theory of computation and studies of explanatory depth. That effort became the generative enterprise within the biolinguistics framework. Tensions quickly arose: The elements of explanatory theories (generative grammars) were far beyond the reach of taxonomic procedures. The structuralist principle that language is a matter of training and habit, extended by analogy, was unsustainable. More generally, the mood of “virtually everything is known” became “almost nothing is understood,” a familiar phenomenon in the history of science, opening a new and exciting era for a flourishing discipline. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 7 is January 14, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

中文翻译：

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过去和现在的语言学：一些个人思考

到 20 世纪中叶，在前几年取得的巨大成就的基础上，语言学界已经达成了工作共识。共时语言学被确立为一门科学，一门“分类”科学，具有复杂的数据分析程序。分类科学有局限性。它不问“为什么？” 利用计算理论和解释深度研究提供的见解寻求解释理论的时机已经成熟。这一努力成为生物语言学框架内的创生事业。紧张局势迅速出现：解释理论（生成语法）的要素远远超出了分类程序的范围。语言是训练和习惯问题的结构主义原则，通过类比扩展，是不可持续的。更普遍，“几乎什么都知道”的情绪变成了“几乎一无所知”，这是科学史上一个熟悉的现象，为一门蓬勃发展的学科开启了一个激动人心的新时代。《语言学年度评论》第 7 卷的预计最终在线出版日期为 2021 年 1 月 14 日。有关修订后的估计，请参阅 http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates。