Regarding your second point, #grantsmanship. Unfortunately it's quite hard to get funding for basic research without arguing it will help (=health intervention,

Regarding your second point, #grantsmanship. Unfortunately it's quite hard to get funding for basic research without arguing it will help (=health intervention, diagnostics) or hurt (=help kill the bad guys, or at least manage them). Regarding your first point, this isn't so nutty. Bayesian approaches to PCFG induction are getting increasingly sophisticated. It's not grammar identification in the limit, it's coming up with a probabilistic linguistic representation that improves your predictions (all models are wrong, these are just more useful than having no expectations regarding linguistic structure).