An overdue remark on what linguistics needs

[Straight, H. Stephen]

Chomsky has more in common with Ptolemy (2nd century) than Galileo (17th century).  Chomsky, while claiming to replace anti-psychological "structuralism" with a "mind"-focused theory of language, in fact put forward a model of language knowledge as a "grammar" with no (to date) operationalizable relationship to either language comprehension or language production and with only a circular (descriptive but not explanatory) relationship to "grammaticality".  

The rules of a generative grammar have proven problematic for reasons parallel to those of Ptolemy's heavenly epicycles.  The underlying model--ethnocentricity in the case of Ptolemy, logicentricity in the case of Chomsky--is a non-starter.  Linguistics owes to Chomsky and his followers both its rise into the academic firmament and its having become stuck there with no tie to earthly reality.  The only important insights into language that have emerged in the last 50 years have occurred in spite of or in opposition to Chomskyan theory.  

Linguistics lacks not only a Galileo or Kepler (17th century) but also a Copernicus (16th century) and, arguably, has not yet even had a theorist as prescient as Aristarchus of Samos (3rd century BC), "the first known person to speculate that the Earth revolves around a stationary sun" (Wikipedia).  FWIW, my candidate Aristarchian insight is a corticocentric view of language, in which the neural subcomponents of language processing, both receptive and expressive, are seen as separate but interacting agents in the creation of linguistic percepts and products, with no overarching "grammar" governing their interaction beyond the brute and always conflict-ridden reality of their need to interact effectively in physico-temporal reality.

H Stephen Straight
Professor of Anthropology & of Linguistics | Binghamton University, State University of New York 

-----Original Message-----
From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of dharv at mail.optusnet.com.au
Sent: Monday 10 November 2008 02:09
To: Salinas17 at aol.com; funknet at mailman.rice.edu
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Concerning WALS - Bees, Bats, Butterflies

At 10:48 PM -0500 9/11/08, Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
snip..

>  we need a Copernicus, not a Chomsky or a Greenberg.

A reminder that it was Kepler who formulated the planetary laws, and 
a comment that Chomsky has in common with Galileo a 
discipline-changing body of work (subsequently elevated into a theory 
of everything). Both also had clashes with authority although of a 
rather different kind. Maybe we haven't yet had our Darwin or 
Einstein but to be a Galileo is not to be sniffed at.
-- 
David Harvey
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