autonomy of syntax

[David Golumbia]

here's a sentence from a recent posting that, for me,
captures the general intuition i find most troubling in both Chomskyan and
non-Chomskyan generativist approaches:

> Also it seems to me that the
> messiness of linguistic data, rather than refuting an underlying system,
> actually suggests it, whatever flaws there might be in Saussure's langue
> et parole and Chomsky's competence-performance models.

Not just that the messiness would *accommodate* or *allow* a system, but
"suggests" it -- how have we got to the point where this seems a
reasonable interpretation of the world's barely-documented, hardly known
linguistic diversity?



--
dgolumbi at panix.com
David Golumbia