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Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language is a response to what the author sees as a crisis. In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky electrified theoretical linguistics with his hypothesis that humans possess an innate capacity for language. The heart of his conception was a linguistic "deep structure," invariant across the species, with individual languages varying according to how they translate this foundation into "surface structure," plugging in their own words and rules of grammar.
Showcase example of "deep" versus "surface": we are more likely to render Who do you want to see? as Who do you wanna see? than we are to render Who do you want to win the game? as Who do you wanna win the game? Now why is that so? Chomsky's theory proposed that if we look at the deep structure of the latter case, who immediately precedes to win—the verb that who is, if you think about it, the actual subject of in the sentence. (And if you are already having trouble sorting all this out, that's merely evidence of the efficiency of our innate linguistic capacity, which allows us to make such complex distinctions effortlessly, so long as we don't have to explain what we're doing.)
Thus what begins as You want who to win the game? becomes Who do you want to win the game? when who "moves" to the front of the sentence in surface structure. And the reason we are loath to say Who do you wanna win the game? is that when who moves, it leaves behind a "footprint" that blocks want and to from coming together as a contraction: Who do you want __ to win the game?
As originally proposed, Chomsky's deep structure was taken as synonymous with "meaning" itself. Psychologists and philosophers were fascinated with the possibility that linguistics had identified universal structures of meaning underlying the bewildering variousness of the world's languages. Indeed, the notion of deep structure, like relativity or the Uncertainty Principle in physics, quickly became unmoored from its context to be bandied about with abandon in pop intellectual circles. But to nonlinguists, whether scholars or civilians, "traffic rule" issues such as the wanna quirk were of little interest, while syntacticians were much more interested precisely in such details than in exploring the nature of meaning in a larger sense. The trend continues, and the promise Chomsky's hypothesis once held outside linguistics has long been dismissed as a mirage.
Meanwhile, many linguists have themselves rejected Chomsky's view and focused instead on meaning, or semantics. To them, the operations that fascinate the syntactician appear a needlessly elaborated, epistemologically suspect distraction, isolating linguistics from other disciplines. The semanticist notes that in the sentences The ball rolled down the hill and Beth rolled the ball down the hill, rolled is identical in terms of grammar. But the semantics are different: in the second sentence, rolled refers to someone having caused the ball to roll, rather than it just rolling itself. That is, there is an underlying element of causation that expresses itself throughout any language's grammar, and semanticists point to other such elements as well. There is more for the philosopher or psychologist to grab onto in this approach; it seems to address what we think of as "language" more directly than fretting over why we don't say Who do you wanna win the game?
The unseemly warring between the two sides that raged throughout the 1970s has today devolved into a sullen stalemate. The syntacticians hope that the traffic rules alone will explain most of the quirks within languages and the variations between them. Paying minimal attention to the messiness of real-world meanings, they tend to dismiss those who do as "unscientific"—even when overall their work addresses but a sliver of what most of us would call "language" at all. Meanwhile, semanticists pride themselves on forging a more "realistic" or perhaps even humanistic model. But at the end of the day, few of them attempt to demonstrate how their strategies explain the relevant facts better than syntactic ones, such that their work often seems tangential to what most would consider "linguistics" at all.
