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The article attempts to relate several hypothetical anecdotes, informally, but is otherwise scant on actual evidence. Here and there, are sprinkled vague nods

The article attempts to relate several hypothetical anecdotes, informally, but is otherwise scant on actual evidence. Here and there, are sprinkled vague nods towards unnamed "researchers" and "the new way" but not many specifics on who, when or how. Mostly it's just: Trust us, here's how it is now. The article uses only one name, and only aims to chip away at it. It has no new celebrities, no names stepping forward to take credit for the incredible breakthroughs that destroy the old and oh-so-inferior. The authors, and the editor are after something. But they offer nothing (or very little) in exchange, pre-supposing that it's just common sense which prevails over the tyrrany of something innately unlikable. Not sure why linguistics ruffles some people's feathers. It's such a dry, imprecise sociological subject after all. EDIT: they make a single mention, in passing, of research by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, but very briefly, and don't return to it afterward.

chillacy 10y ago
I hope this isn't the first time you're hearing that UG is on its way out.. articles like this pop up quite frequently.
mikekchar 10y ago
Even a single citation to a paper would have gone a long way.... sigh... From my perspective Universal Grammar is not even the biggest contribution to language acquisition that Chomsky made: it's the notion that the mechanism for language acquisition is the same in children as it is in adults. What's weird about this is that I have always been under the impression that Chomsky's opinion was that language acquisition was not a lock step uncovering of universal grammar, but that universal grammar was simply the best way to represent language. Indeed, the work that has been done showing that Krashen's natural order hypothesis is correct (that people acquire the grammar for a language in a certain particular order, independent of the order in which is is presented) give some credence to that notion. It doesn't necessarily follow that the brain actually holds a representation of universal grammar. I came away from this article being confused as to whether I need to re-read Chomsky's work, or whether the author needs to do so.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- 4ad 10y ago
  > people acquire the grammar for a language in a certain particular order, independent of the order in which is is presented I didn't know about this. It sure makes sense. Do you know of any institute, course, or individual that makes use of this fact in order to optimize for learning a new language? I need to learn German, and let's just say that I find the traditional learning methods almost impossible. And I have been living in a German-speaking country for over 5 years now.
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    How much time every day do you spend on learning German?
    - 4ad 10y ago
      Like read books or have someone tutor me? Right now I spend zero time doing this. I just gave up. I tried but nothing stuck, and it was so difficult for me on an intellectual level that quite literally after one hour of study I was so mentally worn out that I could not do my job. I had to sleep through the rest of the day and I literally felt like I was going crazy. I don't get it, I can learn (and remember) a new programming language and have some practical level of competency in hours (even with Haskell, actually, Haskell was one of the easier languages), but with real languages I am totally inapt. In school I studied 8 years of French, two or three classes per week, and it was a real course, nothing leisurely, lots of homework. But I can't speak a single word of French. Believe me, I worked really hard those 8 years just to get a passing grade, and if I weren't exceptional at Physics (won 1st prize at the National Physics Olympiad, and many other national contests), I'm pretty sure my teacher would have failed me. I spoke my first word while being 3 months old, and at 6 months I was using coherent sentences and engaging in conversation with people. I guess I used up all my language acquisition skills in that stage of development. What is going on?
      - 10y ago
praptak 10y ago
> Not sure why linguistics ruffles some people's feathers. My hypothesis is that it's Chomsky personally who ruffles people's feathers. And this is not because his work on linguistics but rather his political views.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  Chomsky isn't afraid to pick a fight.......whether it's with BF Skinner, or George Lakoff, he hasn't backed down.
- mattkrause 10y ago
  I really doubt it's his politics. George Layoff and Chomsky had (have?) a protracted, acrimonious battle over the relationship between syntax and semantics, but they're not miles apart, politically. I find Chomsky frustrating because he comes up with these incredibly elegant theoretical machinery--and then is totally disinterested in empirically testing then. For example, the "Language Acquisition Device" absolutely HAS to be the brain, but a lot of the discussion of it--and Universal Grammar--are totally untethered by psychology and neuroscience. For a while, it seemed like he regarded recursion as a key aspect of human language, versus animal "communications." Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky had a 2002 article in Science that seemed to argue as much, and they were excited to show that humans, but not monkeys, can learn center-embedded recursion patterns[1]. However, Chomsky seems to have subtly backed away from that and now says that recursion important but might not manifest itself in all human languages (or something along those lines).
  - ScottBurson 10y ago
    It's "Lakoff", but I suspect you typed it correctly and the spelling corrector "fixed" it for you.
    - mattkrause 10y ago
      Yup--autocorrecto. Perhaps Chomsky was right about the probability of a sentence being meaningless after all. /s
MawNicker 10y ago
The ruffling seems to come from the term: universal grammar. Without a proper understanding the term can cause all sorts of misapprehensions. It sounds like a mandate; it makes people rebellious. Noam Chomsky specifically disavows any evolutionary theory. He just hand waves it for the establishment of the model. Many people who "refute" him simply attempt to provide this. All he intended to build was the simplest concievable system for language parsing. That's all he ever claims to have. When he responds to criticism it is always staunchly from this context. People just don't care to understand the propositions of the actual idea. I suspect they're intent on invalidating him to undermine his political views.
- pjlegato 10y ago
  Many -- perhaps even most -- of his fiercest opponents within linguistics agree strongly with most of his political views. George Lakoff, for example, is well known as a leading anti-Chomskyite linguist, and also as a vocal far-leftist whose political views largely echo Chomsky's.
  - dilemma 10y ago
    I'm not so sure that it's correct to call Chomsky a leftist. He clearly is not a Marxist and finds the ideology ridiculous, at the same level as religion. If Lakoff is a Marxist or socialist, then the two clearly do not have political views that are compatible. Chomsky is, I believe, best referred to as a social libertarian, which means that he opposes both state and enterprise power and see them as more or less the same, and instead favors the individual. It is clear here why Marxists don't like him, at all. I think this is also why the authors of the OA challenge Chomsky without offering anything other than minor claims hidden away throughout the text that language is a product of social interaction rather than a capability that lies within the individual. It is about the collective versus the individual and as a fierce individualist, the authors disagree with Chomsky on political grounds, not scientific.
    - griffinmahon 10y ago
      He's probably better described as an anarcho-syndicalist (I don't think "social libertarian" does the radicalness of his politics justice): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism#Noam_Chomsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism#Noam_Choms....
jesuslop 10y ago
Some of the context of this can be found in the 'Poverty of stimulus' wikipedia entry. Chomsky argument was tried to be cast in theorem form in a paper of E. M. Gold to apparently settle the question (in favour of Chomsky), but despite that result the computational linguists have been busy making useful work in NLP with machine learning methods, and now the debate has shifted from armchair discussion to the question of the interest of the emerging new language technologies and the role of unsupervised learning. Less famous, Zellig Harris (Chomsky thesis advisor), is now cited in deep learning language modelling literature as a precursor of the distributional model pushed by Bengio that is now used in word2vec and what not nlp.
panglott 10y ago
Yea, I was reading through the article and wondering why they didn't mention actual researchers. Where's the discussion of Tomasello's work, for example? Then down at the bottom, I saw: More to Explore Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Michael Tomasello. Harvard University Press, 2003. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Adele Goldberg. Oxford University Press, 2006. Language, Usage and Cognition. Joan Bybee. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Some of the usual suspects. Further discussion of these would have improved the article immensely. I generally agree with the article, but it has a lot of nits to pick—it mischaracterizes the debate over Pirahã and recursion, for example, and significant evidence against the pro-drop parameter actually came from Western European languages.

chillacy 10y ago

I hope this isn't the first time you're hearing that UG is on its way out.. articles like this pop up quite frequently.

mikekchar 10y ago

Even a single citation to a paper would have gone a long way.... sigh... From my perspective Universal Grammar is not even the biggest contribution to language acquisition that Chomsky made: it's the notion that the mechanism for language acquisition is the same in children as it is in adults. What's weird about this is that I have always been under the impression that Chomsky's opinion was that language acquisition was not a lock step uncovering of universal grammar, but that universal grammar was simply the best way to represent language. Indeed, the work that has been done showing that Krashen's natural order hypothesis is correct (that people acquire the grammar for a language in a certain particular order, independent of the order in which is is presented) give some credence to that notion. It doesn't necessarily follow that the brain actually holds a representation of universal grammar. I came away from this article being confused as to whether I need to re-read Chomsky's work, or whether the author needs to do so.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
4ad 10y ago
> people acquire the grammar for a language in a certain particular order, independent of the order in which is is presented I didn't know about this. It sure makes sense. Do you know of any institute, course, or individual that makes use of this fact in order to optimize for learning a new language? I need to learn German, and let's just say that I find the traditional learning methods almost impossible. And I have been living in a German-speaking country for over 5 years now.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  How much time every day do you spend on learning German?
  - 4ad 10y ago
    Like read books or have someone tutor me? Right now I spend zero time doing this. I just gave up. I tried but nothing stuck, and it was so difficult for me on an intellectual level that quite literally after one hour of study I was so mentally worn out that I could not do my job. I had to sleep through the rest of the day and I literally felt like I was going crazy. I don't get it, I can learn (and remember) a new programming language and have some practical level of competency in hours (even with Haskell, actually, Haskell was one of the easier languages), but with real languages I am totally inapt. In school I studied 8 years of French, two or three classes per week, and it was a real course, nothing leisurely, lots of homework. But I can't speak a single word of French. Believe me, I worked really hard those 8 years just to get a passing grade, and if I weren't exceptional at Physics (won 1st prize at the National Physics Olympiad, and many other national contests), I'm pretty sure my teacher would have failed me. I spoke my first word while being 3 months old, and at 6 months I was using coherent sentences and engaging in conversation with people. I guess I used up all my language acquisition skills in that stage of development. What is going on?
    - 10y ago

praptak 10y ago

> Not sure why linguistics ruffles some people's feathers. My hypothesis is that it's Chomsky personally who ruffles people's feathers. And this is not because his work on linguistics but rather his political views.

ktRolster 10y ago
Chomsky isn't afraid to pick a fight.......whether it's with BF Skinner, or George Lakoff, he hasn't backed down.
mattkrause 10y ago
I really doubt it's his politics. George Layoff and Chomsky had (have?) a protracted, acrimonious battle over the relationship between syntax and semantics, but they're not miles apart, politically. I find Chomsky frustrating because he comes up with these incredibly elegant theoretical machinery--and then is totally disinterested in empirically testing then. For example, the "Language Acquisition Device" absolutely HAS to be the brain, but a lot of the discussion of it--and Universal Grammar--are totally untethered by psychology and neuroscience. For a while, it seemed like he regarded recursion as a key aspect of human language, versus animal "communications." Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky had a 2002 article in Science that seemed to argue as much, and they were excited to show that humans, but not monkeys, can learn center-embedded recursion patterns[1]. However, Chomsky seems to have subtly backed away from that and now says that recursion important but might not manifest itself in all human languages (or something along those lines).
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  It's "Lakoff", but I suspect you typed it correctly and the spelling corrector "fixed" it for you.
  - mattkrause 10y ago
    Yup--autocorrecto. Perhaps Chomsky was right about the probability of a sentence being meaningless after all. /s

MawNicker 10y ago

The ruffling seems to come from the term: universal grammar. Without a proper understanding the term can cause all sorts of misapprehensions. It sounds like a mandate; it makes people rebellious. Noam Chomsky specifically disavows any evolutionary theory. He just hand waves it for the establishment of the model. Many people who "refute" him simply attempt to provide this. All he intended to build was the simplest concievable system for language parsing. That's all he ever claims to have. When he responds to criticism it is always staunchly from this context. People just don't care to understand the propositions of the actual idea. I suspect they're intent on invalidating him to undermine his political views.

pjlegato 10y ago
Many -- perhaps even most -- of his fiercest opponents within linguistics agree strongly with most of his political views. George Lakoff, for example, is well known as a leading anti-Chomskyite linguist, and also as a vocal far-leftist whose political views largely echo Chomsky's.
- dilemma 10y ago
  I'm not so sure that it's correct to call Chomsky a leftist. He clearly is not a Marxist and finds the ideology ridiculous, at the same level as religion. If Lakoff is a Marxist or socialist, then the two clearly do not have political views that are compatible. Chomsky is, I believe, best referred to as a social libertarian, which means that he opposes both state and enterprise power and see them as more or less the same, and instead favors the individual. It is clear here why Marxists don't like him, at all. I think this is also why the authors of the OA challenge Chomsky without offering anything other than minor claims hidden away throughout the text that language is a product of social interaction rather than a capability that lies within the individual. It is about the collective versus the individual and as a fierce individualist, the authors disagree with Chomsky on political grounds, not scientific.
  - griffinmahon 10y ago
    He's probably better described as an anarcho-syndicalist (I don't think "social libertarian" does the radicalness of his politics justice): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism#Noam_Chomsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism#Noam_Choms....

jesuslop 10y ago

Some of the context of this can be found in the 'Poverty of stimulus' wikipedia entry. Chomsky argument was tried to be cast in theorem form in a paper of E. M. Gold to apparently settle the question (in favour of Chomsky), but despite that result the computational linguists have been busy making useful work in NLP with machine learning methods, and now the debate has shifted from armchair discussion to the question of the interest of the emerging new language technologies and the role of unsupervised learning. Less famous, Zellig Harris (Chomsky thesis advisor), is now cited in deep learning language modelling literature as a precursor of the distributional model pushed by Bengio that is now used in word2vec and what not nlp.

panglott 10y ago

Yea, I was reading through the article and wondering why they didn't mention actual researchers. Where's the discussion of Tomasello's work, for example? Then down at the bottom, I saw: More to Explore Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Michael Tomasello. Harvard University Press, 2003. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Adele Goldberg. Oxford University Press, 2006. Language, Usage and Cognition. Joan Bybee. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Some of the usual suspects. Further discussion of these would have improved the article immensely. I generally agree with the article, but it has a lot of nits to pick—it mischaracterizes the debate over Pirahã and recursion, for example, and significant evidence against the pro-drop parameter actually came from Western European languages.