4 ms·

In addition, as far as I can see, all of its arguments seem to implicitly target some sort of weird strawman version of Chomskian theories. Anyone with more tha

by 4bpp 11y ago

In addition, as far as I can see, all of its arguments seem to implicitly target some sort of weird strawman version of Chomskian theories. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of linguistics would know that no syntacticist expects grammatical universals, if they exist, to be something as simplistic as "words are always ordered like this" or "there are adverbs", or even that there exist positive statements that can be made about all human languages at all (trivially false: put two individuals with a severe speech development disorder in a room and let them establish some basic form of communication; call it a language). Theorems like EPP and much of 80s control theory (the interplay between recursive structure and what determiner phrases, e.g. pronouns like "he" or demonstratives like "that", refer to), while occasionally being painfully overstretched, do seem to exhibit far better than chance predictive power and had their physics-like moments of conspicuous gaps in predicted taxonomies being neatly filled later. (Check "empty categories" or the rules mentioned under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRO_%28linguistics%29. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRO_%28linguistics%29.) I'm fairly disappointed comparing this to the usual quality of Aeon's articles.

tmalsburg2 11y ago
> all of its arguments seem to implicitly target some sort of weird strawman version of Chomskian theories. Innateness of language is not a theory because it lacks what is the hallmark of any scientific theory: the ability to produce falsifiable predictions. People argue against ridiculous straw-men because there is nothing better that we could test. Chomsky proposed innateness to challenge the behaviourists who simply assumed that language is learned without even trying to proof it. Back in the day that was an honorable goal but half a century later we have to acknowledge that Chomsky and his followers have failed to offer something better, they just replaced one unfounded belief by another.

by 4bpp 11y ago

tmalsburg2 11y ago

> all of its arguments seem to implicitly target some sort of weird strawman version of Chomskian theories. Innateness of language is not a theory because it lacks what is the hallmark of any scientific theory: the ability to produce falsifiable predictions. People argue against ridiculous straw-men because there is nothing better that we could test. Chomsky proposed innateness to challenge the behaviourists who simply assumed that language is learned without even trying to proof it. Back in the day that was an honorable goal but half a century later we have to acknowledge that Chomsky and his followers have failed to offer something better, they just replaced one unfounded belief by another.