I’m Tired of Chomsky (Part I)

Plato also believed that concepts are more real than reality. I recently watched a long YouTube video of Chomsky speaking pretty familiar stuff. The part on language origins was especially trite; it left me unsure whether to laugh or shake my head. So much for that old man, thought I. Then Christina Behme posted a comment on this blog with a link to her book review denouncing Noam Chomsky's The Science of Language. For a moment I thought perhaps the linguistics world had come full circle. Chomsky's stardom had begun with a take-down book review, so it might end. Of course the review does not satisfy those anticipations. I suppose it could not. Chomsky was reviewing a book that set forth a theory that, as Chomsky demonstrated, was inadequate to account for the facts of language. One of Behme's complaints is that Chomsky does not set forth a theory, so it couldn't be knocked down. Chomsky's Theory Yet Chomsky does have a theory. The language he describes is an internal process of generating strings of symbols. The brain contains a series of elementary concepts that are manipulated as symbols by a process called Merge. Merge creates strings by following the rules of a Universal Grammar for organizing symbols. Because Merge has a recursive function (i.e., strings can be embedded in existing strings), the potential length of these strings is unlimited. The brain system, or module, can pass these strings to at least two other modules: the semantic module that adds meaning and ...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Source Type: blogs