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"An Assault on the Bastions" During that same year, 1957, the Chomskys had their first child. It was decided that Carol would stay home with the baby and Noam would support the family. They had delayed having children for some time (they had been married eight years) because of their lingering uncertainty as to whether they should live in the United States or in Israel; they had also been unsure whether Noam could find work in the academy. He was, however, increasingly in demand as a lecturer and teacher. Throughout 1957, he commuted from Cambridge to Philadelphia, where he had been engaged by the University of Pennsylvania to teach. At the invitation of the Yiddishist and early sociolinguist Uriel Weinreich, he also became visiting professor at Columbia University in New York City. Then, at the age of twenty-nine, Chomsky was promoted to associate professor at MIT, and subsequently took up a one-year position as National Science Foundation fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. His work was causing significant upheaval within the field of linguistics. Two conferences ­ one to be held in 1958 and the other in 1959 ­ known as the Texas Conferences on Problems of Linguistic Analysis in English, were being organized by Archibald Hill, the secretary of the Linguistic Society of America and one of the elder statesmen of the discipline. They were originally intended, Chomsky writes, "to give a fair hearing to a new and possibl[y] promising conception of language theory and its application to the analysis of English." Instead, he claims, they seem to have been "organized with the specific purpose of nipping this heresy in the bud" (31 Mar. 1995). The leading lights of American structuralism, referred to by Chomsky as "those known as `hatchet men' in the profession," were all present, including Martin Joos, H. L. Smith, and Robert Stockwell ­ a rising young star. "They also invited Ralph Long, a traditional grammarian who was mostly the butt of adolescent humor. Their task was to mock Long and to destroy me" (31 Mar. 1995). They didn't succeed. The battle lines were ultimately drawn in a way they had not anticipated. Chomsky explains: Long and I got along very well, and I was defending him throughout, in part for personal reasons ­ I didn't like what was going on--and in part because there are actually connections between generative and traditional grammar. This was pretty hard for them to take. I knew a lot of mathematics and logic, which meant I could follow their arguments, and they couldn't use the usual technical tricks to steamroller opposition. Also, it became pretty clear that they simply couldn't deal with the arguments and issues, and their whole stand (presented at the time with huge self-confidence and pride) collapsed on inspection. Stockwell understood it, and pretty much switched sides in the middle. (31 Mar. 1995) The end result of all of this was that people in the field were eventually compelled to choose sides. Bernard Bloch was "intrigued, though he didn't believe a word" of it. W. V. O. Quine "lost interest" in him, Chomsky writes. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and Morris Halle "did agree" with him, and "were supportive"; "ditto" Robert Lees, who then "completely abandoned the Bloomfieldian program"; Robert Stockwell responded in "more or less the same" way; and George Miller was "very supportive, after he abandoned the `behavioral science' framework" (31 Mar. 1995). The second conference, held in 1959, was "pretty much a replay" of the first. The rift within the profession that these conferences encapsulated was exacerbated yet again when the question of whether to publish the proceedings was raised. Hill finally agreed to publish the 1958 proceedings "after a lot of pressure" was brought to bear upon him, but the 1959 proceedings have, Chomsky points out, "never seen the light of day, including my first extensive paper on generative phonology of English, which was really an assault on the bastions ­ phonology." The basic material discussed in the 1959 conference did finally appear in the quarterly report of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, and was later worked into The Sound Pattern of English. But by then, recalls Chomsky, "Halle and I (with Fred Lukoff, another former Harris student who had found his way to MIT) had already published a paper on generative phonology of English, on stress (the major pride of American linguists), showing that the vast descriptive apparatus of which [mainstream linguists] were so proud was a pointless artifact, which could be explained in terms of some extremely simple generative rules" (31 Mar. 1995). The type of linguistics that Chomsky had conceived during this period was concerned with issues so dramatically different from those that preoccupied his colleagues in most university linguistics departments that one might think he had invented an entirely new field. However, Chomsky was to take great pains demonstrating the links between his ideas and work undertaken hundreds of years earlier.