Back to the Drawing Boards

Anyone familiar with this blog knows of my frustrations with Noam Chomsky. He seems to be so smart and logical, and yet never says anything that sounds half-way right or even usable. For example, he recently published an essay (Catalan Journal of Linguistics, “Some Puzzling Foundational Issues”) that considers the evolution of language, by which Chomsky means “the evolution of the Language Faculty." Is that what most people mean when they consider the evolution of language? I doubt it. Any ordinary person picking up an essay on “the evolution of language” would probably be expect ing an account of how people began to use words. The biggest conundrum would be how people reached an agreement as to what words meant what things. How have I and my neighbors come to share the word and meaning ofshoe? Or whatever the first word was?This obvious question involves various difficulties and the answer depends on more factors than are first evident. Is one of those factors a “Language Faculty”? It would seem plausible, but Chomsky defines his concept in such a way that it is irrelevant to the study of language origins. Yet I found his latest piece interesting because it reveals that Chomsky is beginning to admit to the usual difficulties when he tries to make his lo gic match reality. He has had to rethink a key operation in his theory, something called Merge.Anybody who has studied Chomsky ’s work has seen the pattern many  times. Chomsky proposes some simple principles...
Source: Babel's Dawn - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: blogs