Problems with Chomsky

[Wallace Chafe]

David Tuggy's questions invite so many different answers from so many
points of view that I imagine most subscribers to this list will throw up
their hands and not even attempt to answer them.  "Let me count the ways."
But we shouldn't leave things with the answer that the only thing wrong
with Chomsky's program is deep structure.  Many of us, I'm sure, could
write books on this subject if we wanted to, and the books would be quite
different.  But let me mention several general points that immediately
occur to me, without trying to go into the detail they deserve.

(1)  The nature of the data.  I said a little about this in a recent
message to this list, so won't repeat it here.  But it's worth adding that
an extraordinarily restricted set of phenomena have been involved.

(2)  The focus on the "sentence" as the preeminent unit of language.

(3)  The assignment of too many phenomena to innateness.

(4)  The refusal or inability to explain linguistic phenomena in the
context of other human endowments, whether cognitive (including memory,
consciousness, imagery, emotions, etc.);  social (clearly language is an
interactive phenomenon);  or historical (one can hardly understand the
shape of language without taking account of language change).

(5)  The disregard for the fundamental importance of meaning or content,
which can be traced to Bloomfield's infatuation with behaviorism and
logical positivism as subsequently exaggerated by Harris.  Language
organizes thoughts as much as sounds, and in some ways thoughts are more
important.

In even more general terms, one might say that this vast, wonderfully
beautiful human endowment we call language has been reduced to a few
rather mundane phenomena of limited interest, over which a house of cards
(or series of them) has been erected.

Postscript:  It would be easy to question some of the positive
contributions listed by Brian, but I'll mention just the notion of
"creativity", which has always puzzled me.  The ability of language users
to produce and understand novel sentences (or whatever) doesn't come from
recursion, but from the insertion of a vast lexicon into a relatively
small set of patterns.  Yesterday my wife said to me "Don't mist the
ribbon."  It had to do with squirting water on a Christmas wreath.  I
doubt that she had ever said that before, and I certainly had never heard
it before, but there was no problem (and no recursion).

Wally Chafe