
Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf] - breck
http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/1609/160916-Chomsky.pdf
======
twblalock
This is like asking "Has Einstein been blown out of the water?" in the context
of physics.

The answer is that such a thing would be impossible, because even though his
theories and models are imperfect (as all theories and models are), they were
so influential that they fundamentally changed his field.

Chomsky had a similar effect on linguistics, and even if much of his work ends
up being rejected, his influence will have changed the field of linguistics
forever. The theories that supersede Chomsky's will be developed within the
paradigm he created.

~~~
lillesvin
Linguist here. It really isn't. There are plenty of competing and very
compelling theories in e.g. big parts of Europe. Especially Functional Grammar
and its different branches. The only relation they really have to UG is that
they're not it.

At my university no one in the linguistics department actually subscribed to
UG or any derivatives thereof but in the English department they did. I've
observed sort of the same divide in countries. In English speaking counties UG
seems to be the prevailing theory while it's much less so in non-English
speaking countries.

Unfortunately people are extremely religious about their preferred theory of
grammar, and it's hard to have a useful discussion about it when people are
unable to remove themselves from the subject and discuss it objectively.

~~~
readymade
I studied theoretical linguistics through the graduate level and it wasn't
until rather late in my schooling that I even began to hear of competing
frameworks such as HPSG or LFG, and much of it in passing. There was no
mention of them in the coursework, and the tendency of faculty to sell modern
linguistics as a hard science gave the impression that we were learning a
standard approach that had a provable empirical edge and broad scientific
consensus. Otherwise, why would it be called "Extended Standard Theory"?

While I know that part of the pedagogy was giving students a grounding in
dominant strains of formalism (in North American circles anyway), at times I
felt a bit cheated out of a broader perspective.

Of course in practice many of the competing frameworks are weakly equivalent
in terms of their descriptive power and the differences come down more to
things like biological plausibility, computational complexity, how strongly
you interpret the claims of UG, whether you have any interest in building
tractable computational implementations, and so on. Or how you feel about the
proliferation of empty functional categories, which was what bothered me the
most from an empirical point of view.

------
tzmudzin
If you want to prove a scientist wrong, present evidence to the contrary
rather than personal innuendos and hypotheses / observations without proof.

~~~
pekk
This is a good criticism of a number of Chomsky's polemical papers.

~~~
PavlovsCat
"A number", as is usual with Chomsky, being a bunch of stuff you're not going
to quote, because you'd likely end up eating all of it. There's gotta be a
nest somewhere.

------
atdt
The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances
acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in
Cambridge pick up English at the same rate at which children of illiterate
farmers in Benin pick up Gbe. They will hit the same milestones at the same
age.

We also know that a stroke can seriously impair a person's ability to use
language, even as their memory and powers of abstract reasoning are otherwise
in tact.

The only way to make sense of that that I know of is to suppose that language
engages some sort of specialized structures within the brain.

If such structures exist and are implicated in the acquisition of language by
children across different cultures, then language must not be infinitely
plastic. There must be certain structural properties that languages share that
allow them to be acquired in such a regular, programmatic fashion.

Is this conclusion unwarranted, unreasonable, false, or dubious? Are there
other ways of making sense of these phenomena?

~~~
quanticle
>The manner in which children of diverse cultures and varied circumstances
acquire language is extremely uniform. Children of accomplished academics in
Cambridge pick up English at the same rate at which children of illiterate
farmers in Benin pick up Gbe. They will hit the same milestones at the same
age.

Do you actually know that? Or are you supposing it because it makes sense?
Given what I know about the differences in educational outcomes between
socioeconomic groups in the US, I wouldn't be surprised if the rate of
language acquisition depended on the number and variety of words that a child
hears. It may very well be the case that the child of the Oxbridge academics
_does_ pick up language more quickly simply because he or she is exposed to
more of it.

~~~
fdej
Yes. Language acquisition follows a standard sequence with specific milestones
universal to all languages. For example, the period around 6-12 months is
critical for phonetic learning. Before 6 months, infants are able to
discriminate between phonetic units present in any language, but after 12
months they are better at making distinctions that occur in their native
language and worse at making distinctions that don't occur in their
environment. For example, Japanese infants are just as good as American
infants at distinguishing between r and l at birth, but lose some of this
ability between 8-10 months.

(Chapter "Language", Principles of Neural Science, 5th ed.)

------
7wQFnQvA
If you read a bit further (pages 2 and after) it's actually not all innuendo.
In fact some of it is actually laudatory about his contributions. It's
basically a very brief summary of Chomsky's ideas and the impact he had on
linguistics as a profession. Namely using trees to model syntactical forms and
his hypothesis on universal grammar. I don't know what it is about HN that
makes people refuse to read past the first little thing they object to and
then bloviate about it.

~~~
notacoward
> I don't know what it is about HN that makes people refuse to read past the
> first little thing they object to and then bloviate about it.

That's hardly unique to HN. Following Chomsky, I'd argue that it's actually a
universal behavior, which merely finds (slight) variation in expression
according to the medium at hand. It even has a Latin name - argumentum ad
logicam - and it's closely related to cherry picking except that it's applied
to parts of the argument instead of to data. In fact, I just did it to you
when I picked on the inessential "about HN" part of your sentence (which reads
fine without it), and if you find that annoying then perhaps you should
consider that you also did it when you jumped into a response about innuendo
without addressing the more substantive discussion that had already occurred.

------
gaius
It's funny, in the 90s at college I knew some people in the Linguistics dept
and even back then, people were saying, Chomsky's deep grammar is obviously
nonsense but we have to learn it anyway because it's in the exam.

------
koverstreet
Off topic, but as long as we have a Chomsky discussion - where would be a good
place to start reading about his theories on the evolution of language?

More on topic, the dude is a giant, and the linked pdf not worth the electrons
it's printed on.

~~~
ktRolster
This paper is a good place to start lol. The paper begins with a summary of
Chomsky's major contributions, and is fairly readable.

The answer is no, Chomsky will probably never be blown out of the water. His
hypothesis is evolving, though.

~~~
pekk
He has one hypothesis?

------
curuinor
It's interesting to think that connectionist theories of language are
literally shipping on Google Translate and people still argue about Chomsky.
Many of the cognitive scientists were poking about with neural nets too - and
they were getting into huge arguments with Chomsky and like folks since the
80's.

~~~
pekk
To be fair, due to the nature of neural networks, there are a great number of
domains where they can be applied in some way without that fact actually
explaining anything about how the domain works.

For example, TD-Gammon plays a mean game of Backgammon, but this does not mean
that Backgammon reduces to connectionism. TD-Gammon applies neural networks in
a specific way with other algorithms involved, and then there are still
underlying facts about what it takes to win at Backgammon which do not
necessarily mandate anything that resembles connectionism.

------
War_Machine
This article shows practically no evidence of its main thesis. To substantiate
that Chomsky has been "blown out of the water", he mentions 3 things:

1) "[...] greater awareness of the diversity of human languages, and
especially the discovery by Daniel Everett of a Brazilian indigenous language,
Pirahã, that apparently has no subordinate clauses"

That's the one and only evidence the author shows for this point. No examples
on how the language works or how it stands in contrast to Universal Grammar,
and no other mention of any other language that might be contradicting UG as
well (even though the author implies that there are other languages that stand
in contradiction to UG). Later on though the author says "It is not even
undisputed that Pirahã lacks subordinate clauses" so the one and only evidence
is still a maybe.

2)"The second is advances in cognitive psychology. [...] Nowadays we know that
the human mind has complex, powerful, abstract capabilities in many areas, not
just language, and new possibilities are opening up for explaining language
from general mechanisms of thinking and learning."

This is not an argument and no evidence has been shown for this point.

3)"The third factor is the increasing use of data-driven methods in
computational linguistics [...] In a data-driven approach, structure arises
because sentences obviously consist of parts that can be recognized before
recognizing the whole. [...] This predicts that the grammar of uncommon words
will be simple and regular, but common words will have more quirks because we
have more examples from which to learn them. That is exactly what we observe
in language, and it’s a source of great clutter in a grammar constructed on
Chomskyan principles."

As far as I know, the fact that sentences have parts that can be individually
recognized before recognizing the whole, is not contradicting UG at all. To
the best of my knowledge, UG only says that there is a structure, not how the
structure comes about. So the only point left is the fact that common words
have more varied usage and are harder to pin down as a particular specific
element of the structure. I don't see how that relates to UG quite frankly.
Maybe someone can enlighten me on this.

I have no particular love for UG, I just know of it on a very general sense,
but if I was a teacher and a student gave me this article as a report, I
would've failed him just for the lack of evidence.

------
johlindenbaum

      (I don’t hear good things about it from political scientists.)
    

Immediately closes tab. I assume the rest of this is garbage innuendos, too?

~~~
weerd
He just couldn't help himself. Just had to throw that in, even after
acknowledging he is not familiar with it.

It's an appropriately weak start to a bland document.

------
philsnow
> Chomsky

Heyyy it's actually about Chomsky qua linguist instead of qua political
whatever!

> It would be premature to conclude that universal grammar has been proven not
> to exist.

> But universal grammar has lost some credibility. Suppose the whole notion is
> eventually abandoned. What will be left?

> Second, psycholinguistics is going to be big business.

> In short, Chomskyanism may be on the wane,

Welp. This is some Fox News "I'm just saying" bullshit right here.

edit:

> Third, opportunities to discover more about language are continuing to open
> out before us.

Language attrition (and the dearth of linguists willing / able to work in the
field to produce ethnographies of dying languages) are _decreasing_ our
opportunities to learn about human language.

------
ommunist
Looks like some very important people ordered Chomsky's discreditation
campaign, because that guy had enough balls to reveal something about them to
general public in his book "How the World Works".

~~~
meric
[http://literarylilt.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/noam-chomskys-
ho...](http://literarylilt.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/noam-chomskys-how-world-
works.html)

------
Grue3
Maybe people will stop listening to his political opinions just because he
used to be credible on some other unrelated topic.

------
jplasmeier
Today I learned about Betteridge's Law [0], which seems apt here. It states
that when a news headline asks a question, the answer is always "no." When it
applies to a paper, I'm disinclined to take the paper seriously...

[0]
-[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
cletus
This gets posted on EVERY submission ending in a question mark. It was old 2
years ago. Now it's just plain trite, pointless, tiresome and distracting.

~~~
tome
I self-aggrandizingly call this tome's law:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549)

~~~
PavlovsCat
Why not skip to the end? When enough articles (ending in a question mark or
not) are discussed the probability of Betteridge's law (as well as anything
else) being mentioned approaches 1. There everybody goes, forever, we are
completely done with that class of stuff now. You're welcome :P

