Non sequiturs: 1. > One of Chomsky's transformative insights was that most sentences that are reasonably long are completely unique in human history ... as wi

Non sequiturs: 1. > One of Chomsky's transformative insights was that most sentences that are reasonably long are completely unique in human history ... as with a sufficient amount of information in every error-tolerant format. Every photo ever taken of the Mona Lisa is unique because the pixels are different, but has a very similar high-level meaning, echoing the paraphrase detection task results discussed in http://www.socher.org/index.php/DeepLearningTutorial/DeepLearningTutorial http://www.socher.org/index.php/DeepLearningTutorial/DeepLea.... 2. > One consequence of this is that people realized that the mimicry argument could not really account for the robust well-formed structure of sentences and give us an infinite set of them. What about gradient well-formedness? Does anyone even in generative linguistics believe in programming language-hard grammaticality? What about acceptability? 3. > What we need to generate an infinite set of well-structured sentences is a grammar. Thus the universal grammar was born ... the field of linguistics has seldom looked back. ...which grammarless statistical models have no problem doing (or if you want to reject them for making mistakes, do you reject people?) Which linguistic univerals, if any, have survived the test of time? What are some testable predictions it has made? I hope I'm not missing the point, and apologies if this has already been said (but not in these exact words, ha ha...)