My problem with Chomsky's view of linguistics is that lacks falsifiability which makes it fundamentally unscientific. I'm not even sure what Chomky's theory is as it has become more and more vague over the decades as evidence has emerged which contradicts it.
In its original form, it was fairly specific and made quite strong claims. One claim, for example, was that we humans uniquely have a specialized language organ/section of brain that evolved at some point in time. No evidence has emerged to support this idea as it seems language skills are not concentrated in a single area of the brain (unlike vision for example). And it actually seems implausible that a genetic mutation would produce a language "organ" as it would confer no advantage to an individual in a society where your peers had no language skills.
And you'd imagine that a "fundamental theory" of language would have some practical application but Chomsky's theories don't seem to have any. For example, you'd imagine that it would provide the basis for the study of language acquisition. I remember a friend with a doctorate in clinical child linguistics laughing when I enquired about how their work in therapeutics for children struggling with language problems used Chomsky's theories. Apparently this "fundamental theory" of language has absolutely no application in this area and earlier attempts to apply it led absolutely nowhere. She says that clinicians ignore it - it has no relevance.
Even in AI natural language processing it led nowhere when it was the foundation of AI research in this area from the 60s to the 80s. All breakthroughs in this area use statistical approaches.
I find linguistics fascinating particularly historical linguistics and I used to be quite surprised at how authors in the area seemed to tip-toe around Chomsky's theories - reading between the lines in Guy Deutscher popular book on the evolution of language, for example, he espouses a theory which seems fundamentally at odds with that of Chomsky's (and also seems far more plausible to me than the idea that language ability just sprang into existance through a random genetic mutation) but he seems to go out his way to credit Chomsky's brilliance.
Having observed the villification of Everett - far beyond what I think would have been reasonable - I now understand why linguists genererally either ignore Chomsky's theory or pay some sort of lip-service to give it credit rather than attack it outright. Doing the latter is academic suicide it seems.
As an amatuer in the area, it looks to me like the Emporer has no clothes. It's a theory which is defended vigourously but has no appparent application and is not truly falsifiable. Even when contradictory evidence emerges, the theory is "refined" not into something more useful - the way most scientific theories evolve - but into something vaguer and even less useful.
it actually seems implausible that a genetic mutation would produce a language "organ" as it would confer no advantage to an individual in a society where your peers had no language skills.
This is a non-sequitur because you're implying that such a mutation would be binary: either a creature has it and can communicate with creatures that have the same, or it hasn't and communication is impossible. That's not how evolution works, specialization of organs can happen over thousands of generations. If a specific mutation is beneficial, it spreads through the population over time, and additional mutations in that area can further develop the organ.
Second, our speech apparatus isn't one "organ" in the narrow sense: our lungs/vocal chords/tongue/lips/cheeks/jaw all contribute to the richness of our speech. The breadth of our speaking ability is a specialization of fine muscle control in all those areas, coupled with a finely-tuned hearing apparatus to analyze and understand those sounds.
It doesn't seem like an extraordinary claim to me that our evolutionary path has enhanced our communication ability far beyond our peer species -- because it's clear to see how a rich vocubulary can aid a species' survival over time. I have no knowledge of Chomsky's specific claims, but I don't think you are representing his theory accurately.
Everything you say is reasonable and I can agree with all of it except the claim that I’m misrepresenting Chomsky - in it’s original form it specifically defined a “language acquisition device” - a part of the brain which evolved specifically and exclusively for language. The only basis for the claim, given the lack of physiological evidence at the time (subsequently evidence emerged against it) was that children were not subjected to enough samples/examples which would explain how they learn language.
Where does Chomsky claim this? As far as I know, he has never claimed any particular part of the brain is responsible for language.
The claim of Chomsky's UG is that there is a genetic component to the language faculty of humans. That's pretty much a truism given that we can speak and our closest biological relatives can't. Presumably this cashes out somewhere in our brain.
There's evidence that certain regions of the brain are involved in Language (Broca & Wernicke's areas) given evidence from brain injuries and their effect on language.
He does posit an LAD (language acquisition device) but this is a logical/theoretical construct, to aid in theory building. It seems very likely that we have this given the universality of language in our species and our ability to learn the language of our own culture. The LAD though has not been claimed to be physically located somewhere in our brains by Chomsky (again afaik). Though presumably if we have it, it is fairly likely to be somewhere within our skulls.
I don't know much about linguistics, so most of your post I can't really evaluate, but responding to the falsifiability of Chomsky's theories: I got the impression that Chomsky makes (among other claims) a pretty specific claim about human language, which is that recursion is a universal feature of human language. That seems falsifiable to me, and an important topic of the article is the academic discussion on whether Everett's findings constitute disproof of Chomsky's theory.
Even the recursion claim is now quite vague - according to Chomsky, while revision is a fundamental feature, not all languages exhibit recursion.
I also realize that I don’t even know what it means for a human language to be recursive. I get sub-clauses but I don’t see their existence as evidence of recursion being a fundamental feature of human language. In English for example, I doubt there are non-contrived examples of sentences which have more than 2 levels of sub-clauses. The concepts are certainly independent with computer languages - originally Algol had procedures (analogous to sub-clauses) without supporting recursion.
> In English for example, I doubt there are non-contrived examples of sentences which have more than 2 levels of sub-clauses.
I think the interesting thing about recursion in language is precisely that we rarely see deeply nested examples yet we don't seem to have issues parsing deeply nested examples when they do occur (if they're not specifically constructed to be hard to parse). The fact that we probably didn't learn this by example might be an indication that our brains are somehow hardwired to look for regularity in grammar, including recursion.
The place to look for more than two levels of subclause is Henry James.
Procedures without recursion was a FORTRAN innovation. Recursion started in Algol. It would not be surprising if the first Algol effort lacked it.
What Chomsky did not understand, and still might not, is that his grammatical structures are fundamental to computation, and necessarily arise anywhere that symbolic processes of any complexity occur. So, their rise is not a product of culture, or of unique human biology, or of nerve biology, but of the architecture of the universe all operate in.
Chomsky's grammatical analysis was anticipated, in fully elaborated detail, in Sanskrit, millennia ago. The structures' importance in fundamentals of computation was understood (by a few -- Schonfinkel, Curry, Church) almost a century ago.[0]
It would not be at all surprising to find the principles to be important to DNA manipulation—particularly as part of immune response, and convergent in multiple independently-developed lineages.
> And it actually seems implausible that a genetic mutation would produce a language "organ" as it would confer no advantage to an individual in a society where your peers had no language skills.
It could evolve primarily for internal thought first, or have some other benefit for enhancing existing systems of vocalized mimicry (for hunting, and maybe other uses).
In its original form, it was fairly specific and made quite strong claims. One claim, for example, was that we humans uniquely have a specialized language organ/section of brain that evolved at some point in time. No evidence has emerged to support this idea as it seems language skills are not concentrated in a single area of the brain (unlike vision for example). And it actually seems implausible that a genetic mutation would produce a language "organ" as it would confer no advantage to an individual in a society where your peers had no language skills.
And you'd imagine that a "fundamental theory" of language would have some practical application but Chomsky's theories don't seem to have any. For example, you'd imagine that it would provide the basis for the study of language acquisition. I remember a friend with a doctorate in clinical child linguistics laughing when I enquired about how their work in therapeutics for children struggling with language problems used Chomsky's theories. Apparently this "fundamental theory" of language has absolutely no application in this area and earlier attempts to apply it led absolutely nowhere. She says that clinicians ignore it - it has no relevance.
Even in AI natural language processing it led nowhere when it was the foundation of AI research in this area from the 60s to the 80s. All breakthroughs in this area use statistical approaches.
I find linguistics fascinating particularly historical linguistics and I used to be quite surprised at how authors in the area seemed to tip-toe around Chomsky's theories - reading between the lines in Guy Deutscher popular book on the evolution of language, for example, he espouses a theory which seems fundamentally at odds with that of Chomsky's (and also seems far more plausible to me than the idea that language ability just sprang into existance through a random genetic mutation) but he seems to go out his way to credit Chomsky's brilliance.
Having observed the villification of Everett - far beyond what I think would have been reasonable - I now understand why linguists genererally either ignore Chomsky's theory or pay some sort of lip-service to give it credit rather than attack it outright. Doing the latter is academic suicide it seems.
As an amatuer in the area, it looks to me like the Emporer has no clothes. It's a theory which is defended vigourously but has no appparent application and is not truly falsifiable. Even when contradictory evidence emerges, the theory is "refined" not into something more useful - the way most scientific theories evolve - but into something vaguer and even less useful.