> Most of the Chomsky-inspired research boils down to fitting carefully selected data into an artificial formal machine and manipulating the said machine into a

> Most of the Chomsky-inspired research boils down to fitting carefully selected data into an artificial formal machine and manipulating the said machine into accepting more and more data, until the machinery ends up being turing complete therefore rendering any result trivial. Ah, that's interesting. Because that describes very well what I felt when I read the early Chomskian works. Very cool theories and models with very little data to support them. At some point, I was wonderering whether the authors of those theories had any practical experience with languages apart from their own (English) mother tongue. And then the models became more and more complex, seemingly in an attempt to make them somehow work with real data, and at the end they became so complex that any data could be matched and no scientifically verifiable predictions could be made.