Hard wired

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

J Lighter is of course right. "Hard-wired" is a metaphor. People do not have wires in their brains. It means 'have a genetic predisposition to'. This is not controversial: language is species-uniform for humans. Whether or not it is species-specific depends on how you define "language"; so this, too, is a trivial question in and of itself.

What is interesting is how well other creatures communicate, what their limitations are for cross-species linguistic adaptation. It is also an interesting question to attempt to precisely define the notion "language" as it applies to humans as opposed to other creatures both real and hypothetical.

 Chomsky's claim was a reaction to simple stmulus-response explanations of language learning as proposed by BF Skinner et al. Wilson, correct me please if I am wrong, but none of this has much to do with T-grammar per se. Most of the work in theoretical syntax in the past 30 years strikes me as "uninteresting" in Chomsky's own sense of the term. The really interesting work has been in the very areas that Chomsky dismissed as "performance" or not properly linguistics (he said, "linguistics is a branch of psychology"), e.g., sociolinguistics, pragmatics, even semiotics.
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