Suboptimist

They represent the intellectual foundation of our society, apparently.

If you’re not familiar with Conservapedia yet, I highly recommend you make yourself acquainted with it, you know, to save yourself from the liberal propaganda peddled by Wikipedia. In all seriousness, though, the Wiki site created by the son of Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly really is fun to read, if only to be amused by a presentation of brilliant idiocy. What caught my eye today was the article on Noam Chomsky (a more balanced approach here. Now, I may be falling in with a crowd of linguists that find themselves at odds with the Chomskyan tradition, but I think this characterization of Chomsky’s work is pure bullshot.

Generative Grammar

Noam Chomsky advocates the view that the human brain has innate ability to generate gramatical [sic] sentences, thus all utterances which is deemed sensical [sic] to the speaker is necessarily grammatical, and the only role the liguist [sic] should play is to decipher its grammatical structure. This view has been criticized by many linguists as nihilistic in that it rejects the notion of ungrammatical sentences. Noam Chomsky also pointed to instances of infants utter grammatical sentence fragments they have not been taught before as evidence for Generative Grammar.

Okay. What? First of all, how is Generative Grammar nihilistic? Second, this misses the point of generative theory entirely.

Universal Grammar

Noam Chomsky also proposed the theory that a kind of universal grammar, a grammar that underlies all human languages, is hard-wired in the human brain. Thus all human languages are fundamentally the same, with only superficial differences. This theory of universal grammar has been criticized by linguist Geoffrey Sampson as being not falsifiable, arguing that the grammatical generalizations made are simply observations about existing languages and not predictions about what is possible in a language. To this day, the search for such universal grammar has been fruitless.

For decades, Noam Chomsky and his followers have been trying to make sense of sentences such as:

Who will be easy for us to get his mother to talk to?

which are deemed to be ungrammatical by a lot of linguists; by using techniques such as linking theory, anti-c-command requirement, A-positions, Bijection Principle, weakest crossover configurations, bound variable anaphora, asymmetric linking, licensing conditions, index of apronoun [sic], null operator analysis, variable binding, configurational [sic] conditions, inappropriate and appropriate antecedents, etc.

I am not even sure how to parse this, especially that, “the search for such universal grammar has been fruitless.” So I am not even going to try. What I will say is how funny it is that apparently, according to our moral superiors at Conservapedia, the theories contained within Chomsky’s generative approach have disproved his theory of Universal Grammar. I guess there are wackos (on both sides) that will take non-political details of people they don’t like and find a way to politicize them.

There are valid criticisms of Chomsky. I am not completely convinced of Universal Grammar or the Competence-Performance model, for example. There is experimental evidence that could refute the latter (which is based on an “ideal” speaker-hearer community, i.e. two people) in that uniformity impedes language acquisition. Additionally, when linguists hear an utterance, they are only measuring performance. Competence is, for all intents and purposes, off limits to measurement.