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Yes, as I said above, politics (re American policy) may have some role, but mostly, he has argued forcefully against a whole range of approaches to studying lan
by jeffmcmahan 9y ago
Yes, as I said above, politics (re American policy) may have some role, but mostly, he has argued forcefully against a whole range of approaches to studying language. And many people (most prominently those in the Barbara Partee/Montague tradition) don't like that.
Oh, and at last look he was not just the most cited linguist. He was the most cited living human being.
(And FWIW, I came to linguistics from philosophy via formal semantics; I once held negative opinions of Chomsky myself. It took time to see that he was right.)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- DFHippie 9y agoI wouldn't say that I ever came to the view that his anti-functionalist views were right. In other fields of science, biology, for example, it's taken as given that one can and should reason from function to form and vice versa. I got my PhD and left to program computers, in large part because I'd soured on the politics within the field. I was interested in semantics myself.