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Thing is, Chomsky is (at least partly) responsible for the so-called Cognitive Revolution. Look up B.F Skinner and notice what happened to his career after Chom

Thing is, Chomsky is (at least partly) responsible for the so-called Cognitive Revolution. Look up B.F Skinner and notice what happened to his career after Chomsky reviewed one of his papers. Skinner's brand of behaviorism was surely something we didn't need around anymore. He also changed the way everyone thinks about language. Before Chomsky, there really was no real theory of syntax that was even close to being scientific and formal. Although probabilistic machine learning methods replaced the Chomskyan brand of formal theoretic methods in NLP, a lot is owed to is work. Obviously there is the Chomsky Hierarchy but even things like the Penn Treebank POS tags are taken straight out of work in the Generative tradition from circa 1970 (not sure why no one has tried the updated and more accurate tags currently being used in theoretical linguistics). Anyways I could go on and on but Im wondering what your Dad has to say about this ? P.S There is an ongoing joke in the field of Linguistics about people who either think they understand Chomsky or just straight up don't understand him. Its difficult stuff.

samch 11y ago
"No question that a lot of the tools developed under generative grammar have proved useful, and one can certainly cite the Huxleyan principle that truth comes sooner from error than from a vacuum. I think I would say that the American structuralist tradition was headed in a wrong direction from at least 1933 (Bloomfield's Language) and that Chomsky (despite the claims of his followers that he made a revolutionary break from structuralism) simply gave structuralism a mathematical rigor that allowed it to be taken to its logical conclusion. The tools that were developed in the process have allowed the field (or the more brain-oriented parts of it) to move in a rather decisively different direction. Full disclosure: I got my PhD at Yale under Syd Lamb, so naturally I would not be classed as a Chomskyan. It took me some years to realize that Lamb's StratGram itself suffered from the same reductionist flaws. The only theoretical school I know of that had a chance of moving in the right direction (until very recently) was Firth's. Unfortunately, neither he nor his followers developed the theoretical tools that were needed. Certainly Halliday's Systemics became as reductionist as any of the others. Hudson's word grammar made some good moves but never really developed well. So yeah, Chomsky set something in motion that produced some useful theoretical tools that could be used to help push off in new directions. But the TGG tradition, being a well developed extension of the Bloomfieldian tradition, is still basically a dead end." -My dad
- discreteinfinit 11y ago
  Your Dad really likes assumptions and not providing arguments but Ill look into some of the names Ive never heard of. Thanks !
- discreteinfinit 11y ago
  I mean, if you happen to have some data that Stratificational Grammar can explain better than Generative Grammar I would love to see it. There are a bunch of theories directly influenced by Chomsky which offer alternatives to generative grammar. I've yet to see someone show that one is superior. In many ways, they are all extensionally equivalent.
  - samch 11y ago
    "I never said that StratGram can explain things better than TGG. I said it had the same reductionist flaws. It and all the theories influenced by Chomsky are really outgrowths of Bloomfieldian structuralism and share its underlying orientation. As you say, in many ways they are all extensionally equivalent. The field needs to move beyond all of them. Don't know what assumptions you are referring to, but a forum like this really isn't the place for detailed arguments (even though I used to require my students to provide data, analysis, and argument in two-page, double spaced papers). Just check out J. R. Firth, and read him not for the outdated details but to see what his underlying assumptions are." -My dad
panglott 11y ago
Perhaps. It's kind of a trope these days to deride pre-Chomsky linguists as a bunch of wrong-headed behaviorists. But Skinner was advocating a theory of psychology. Most linguists prior to Chomsky were not really committed to behaviorist psychology, just happy to borrow it for use against the prevailing scientific racism. Chomsky is a theoretical linguist, but not really a scientific one. Generative linguistics does not have a good tradition of basing conclusions about language on empirical study of language use, with the implication that there's hardly any point in studying the structure of diverse languages (since they're all the same deep structure). Take the speech establishing the Principles & Parameters theory, which likened the linguistic feature of pro-drop to a series of switches the brain could flip on or off to establish a language as pro-drop...when subsequent research immediately showed pro-drop to be more of a continuum than a binary feature. There is all the wasted effort, like generative grammars of endangered languages that relied on morphology rather than syntax to communicate the same information. Then there are the bad assumptions, like the "poverty of the stimulus" argument, that had no real empirical basis when he made it. This supported ideas like linguistic nativism that got exported out of linguistics since Chomskyan linguistics was a dominant theory at the time. Whereas in truth linguistics has always been a multi-paradigmatic field.
- discreteinfinit 11y ago
  Theoretical Linguistics in the Generative tradition is entirely based on empirical data. If a theoretical linguist proposed a theory without any empirical data to support it, they would (and do) get laughed at. The poverty of the stimulus argument (which can be traced back to Plato) has plenty of evidence supporting it. Yes there is negative evidence provided to children in some cultures. In North American elementary schools and often at home, children are told when they are saying something that is considered 'wrong'. There are many cultures, families and situations where this does not happen at all and children will learn their native language just by being exposed to people in their community using language. In that case the child is only exposed to positive evidence. What is crucial here is the fact that children CAN learn a language with only positive evidence. They just listen. In addition, the similarities between the languages of the world far outweigh the differences. There is no way to account for this fact without positing some innate knowledge of language. Also, read up on the distinction between competence and performance. I noticed you mentioned 'language use'. Yes, it is a mistake to base a theory on language use. We are talking about an ideal speaker-hearer situation. Language in a vacuum. Sound familiar?

samch 11y ago

"No question that a lot of the tools developed under generative grammar have proved useful, and one can certainly cite the Huxleyan principle that truth comes sooner from error than from a vacuum. I think I would say that the American structuralist tradition was headed in a wrong direction from at least 1933 (Bloomfield's Language) and that Chomsky (despite the claims of his followers that he made a revolutionary break from structuralism) simply gave structuralism a mathematical rigor that allowed it to be taken to its logical conclusion. The tools that were developed in the process have allowed the field (or the more brain-oriented parts of it) to move in a rather decisively different direction. Full disclosure: I got my PhD at Yale under Syd Lamb, so naturally I would not be classed as a Chomskyan. It took me some years to realize that Lamb's StratGram itself suffered from the same reductionist flaws. The only theoretical school I know of that had a chance of moving in the right direction (until very recently) was Firth's. Unfortunately, neither he nor his followers developed the theoretical tools that were needed. Certainly Halliday's Systemics became as reductionist as any of the others. Hudson's word grammar made some good moves but never really developed well. So yeah, Chomsky set something in motion that produced some useful theoretical tools that could be used to help push off in new directions. But the TGG tradition, being a well developed extension of the Bloomfieldian tradition, is still basically a dead end." -My dad

discreteinfinit 11y ago
Your Dad really likes assumptions and not providing arguments but Ill look into some of the names Ive never heard of. Thanks !
discreteinfinit 11y ago
I mean, if you happen to have some data that Stratificational Grammar can explain better than Generative Grammar I would love to see it. There are a bunch of theories directly influenced by Chomsky which offer alternatives to generative grammar. I've yet to see someone show that one is superior. In many ways, they are all extensionally equivalent.
- samch 11y ago
  "I never said that StratGram can explain things better than TGG. I said it had the same reductionist flaws. It and all the theories influenced by Chomsky are really outgrowths of Bloomfieldian structuralism and share its underlying orientation. As you say, in many ways they are all extensionally equivalent. The field needs to move beyond all of them. Don't know what assumptions you are referring to, but a forum like this really isn't the place for detailed arguments (even though I used to require my students to provide data, analysis, and argument in two-page, double spaced papers). Just check out J. R. Firth, and read him not for the outdated details but to see what his underlying assumptions are." -My dad

panglott 11y ago

Perhaps. It's kind of a trope these days to deride pre-Chomsky linguists as a bunch of wrong-headed behaviorists. But Skinner was advocating a theory of psychology. Most linguists prior to Chomsky were not really committed to behaviorist psychology, just happy to borrow it for use against the prevailing scientific racism. Chomsky is a theoretical linguist, but not really a scientific one. Generative linguistics does not have a good tradition of basing conclusions about language on empirical study of language use, with the implication that there's hardly any point in studying the structure of diverse languages (since they're all the same deep structure). Take the speech establishing the Principles & Parameters theory, which likened the linguistic feature of pro-drop to a series of switches the brain could flip on or off to establish a language as pro-drop...when subsequent research immediately showed pro-drop to be more of a continuum than a binary feature. There is all the wasted effort, like generative grammars of endangered languages that relied on morphology rather than syntax to communicate the same information. Then there are the bad assumptions, like the "poverty of the stimulus" argument, that had no real empirical basis when he made it. This supported ideas like linguistic nativism that got exported out of linguistics since Chomskyan linguistics was a dominant theory at the time. Whereas in truth linguistics has always been a multi-paradigmatic field.

discreteinfinit 11y ago
Theoretical Linguistics in the Generative tradition is entirely based on empirical data. If a theoretical linguist proposed a theory without any empirical data to support it, they would (and do) get laughed at. The poverty of the stimulus argument (which can be traced back to Plato) has plenty of evidence supporting it. Yes there is negative evidence provided to children in some cultures. In North American elementary schools and often at home, children are told when they are saying something that is considered 'wrong'. There are many cultures, families and situations where this does not happen at all and children will learn their native language just by being exposed to people in their community using language. In that case the child is only exposed to positive evidence. What is crucial here is the fact that children CAN learn a language with only positive evidence. They just listen. In addition, the similarities between the languages of the world far outweigh the differences. There is no way to account for this fact without positing some innate knowledge of language. Also, read up on the distinction between competence and performance. I noticed you mentioned 'language use'. Yes, it is a mistake to base a theory on language use. We are talking about an ideal speaker-hearer situation. Language in a vacuum. Sound familiar?