"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 s

"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