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I don't know much about linguistics, so most of your post I can't really evaluate, but responding to the falsifiability of Chomsky's theories: I got the impress

I don't know much about linguistics, so most of your post I can't really evaluate, but responding to the falsifiability of Chomsky's theories: I got the impression that Chomsky makes (among other claims) a pretty specific claim about human language, which is that recursion is a universal feature of human language. That seems falsifiable to me, and an important topic of the article is the academic discussion on whether Everett's findings constitute disproof of Chomsky's theory.

derriz 5y ago
Even the recursion claim is now quite vague - according to Chomsky, while revision is a fundamental feature, not all languages exhibit recursion. I also realize that I don’t even know what it means for a human language to be recursive. I get sub-clauses but I don’t see their existence as evidence of recursion being a fundamental feature of human language. In English for example, I doubt there are non-contrived examples of sentences which have more than 2 levels of sub-clauses. The concepts are certainly independent with computer languages - originally Algol had procedures (analogous to sub-clauses) without supporting recursion.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  The place to look for more than two levels of subclause is Henry James. Procedures without recursion was a FORTRAN innovation. Recursion started in Algol. It would not be surprising if the first Algol effort lacked it. What Chomsky did not understand, and still might not, is that his grammatical structures are fundamental to computation, and necessarily arise anywhere that symbolic processes of any complexity occur. So, their rise is not a product of culture, or of unique human biology, or of nerve biology, but of the architecture of the universe all operate in. Chomsky's grammatical analysis was anticipated, in fully elaborated detail, in Sanskrit, millennia ago. The structures' importance in fundamentals of computation was understood (by a few -- Schonfinkel, Curry, Church) almost a century ago.[0] It would not be at all surprising to find the principles to be important to DNA manipulation—particularly as part of immune response, and convergent in multiple independently-developed lineages. [0] <https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/12/where-did-combinators-come-from-hunting-the-story-of-moses-schonfinkel/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/12/where-did-combin...>
- ookdatnog 5y ago
  > In English for example, I doubt there are non-contrived examples of sentences which have more than 2 levels of sub-clauses. I think the interesting thing about recursion in language is precisely that we rarely see deeply nested examples yet we don't seem to have issues parsing deeply nested examples when they do occur (if they're not specifically constructed to be hard to parse). The fact that we probably didn't learn this by example might be an indication that our brains are somehow hardwired to look for regularity in grammar, including recursion.

derriz 5y ago

Even the recursion claim is now quite vague - according to Chomsky, while revision is a fundamental feature, not all languages exhibit recursion. I also realize that I don’t even know what it means for a human language to be recursive. I get sub-clauses but I don’t see their existence as evidence of recursion being a fundamental feature of human language. In English for example, I doubt there are non-contrived examples of sentences which have more than 2 levels of sub-clauses. The concepts are certainly independent with computer languages - originally Algol had procedures (analogous to sub-clauses) without supporting recursion.

ncmncm 5y ago
The place to look for more than two levels of subclause is Henry James. Procedures without recursion was a FORTRAN innovation. Recursion started in Algol. It would not be surprising if the first Algol effort lacked it. What Chomsky did not understand, and still might not, is that his grammatical structures are fundamental to computation, and necessarily arise anywhere that symbolic processes of any complexity occur. So, their rise is not a product of culture, or of unique human biology, or of nerve biology, but of the architecture of the universe all operate in. Chomsky's grammatical analysis was anticipated, in fully elaborated detail, in Sanskrit, millennia ago. The structures' importance in fundamentals of computation was understood (by a few -- Schonfinkel, Curry, Church) almost a century ago.[0] It would not be at all surprising to find the principles to be important to DNA manipulation—particularly as part of immune response, and convergent in multiple independently-developed lineages. [0] <https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/12/where-did-combinators-come-from-hunting-the-story-of-moses-schonfinkel/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/12/where-did-combin...>
ookdatnog 5y ago
> In English for example, I doubt there are non-contrived examples of sentences which have more than 2 levels of sub-clauses. I think the interesting thing about recursion in language is precisely that we rarely see deeply nested examples yet we don't seem to have issues parsing deeply nested examples when they do occur (if they're not specifically constructed to be hard to parse). The fact that we probably didn't learn this by example might be an indication that our brains are somehow hardwired to look for regularity in grammar, including recursion.