Hallo!

On Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:44:17 +0100, R A Brown wrote:

> Linvi Charles wrote:
> > I did not think anyone hates Chomsky in the sense that others have
> > interpreted.  It just seems like most people hear the name "Chomsky" and
> > have an immediate negative reaction.  
> 
> There have been times that some have reacted with an 
> immediate positive reaction. You'll find them in the 
> archives; and some are still active on the list. To be 
> honest, I would be loath to say whether his linguistic 
> theories have strong support or opposition from most on the 
> list.

My immediate reaction on the name "Chomsky" is slightly, though not
overwhelmingly, negative: I associate his name with the point when
a large part of academic linguistics ceased to be about studying
languages and instead started to be about theorizing about theories
of English (though perhaps undeservedly), and also with a set of
somewhat cranky but not entirely disagreeable political views, but
that is certainly off-topic here and has no bearing on his
contributions to linguistics.

There have been some eloquent criticisms of this development by
linguists.  R. M. W. Dixon once observed that future generations of
linguists will probably look upon the linguistics of our times with
disdain as a period when linguists discussed grammar theories instead
of documenting dying languages.  One linguist (I have forgotten who)
once remarked about grammar writing that if you write a grammar in
the terms of a particular grammar theory, you are likely to write
something useless as the grammar theory will probably go extinct
long before the language documented.

> > Either way, I do not want this thread
> > to devolve into discussion about Chomsky.  *I just want to know who has
> > written on the subject on universal grammar.*
> 
> Chomsky    :)
> 
> Sorry - but if you're interested in the controversial 
> subject of 'universal grammar' it is rather difficult to 
> avoid him - but, Elliot has drawn our attention to the fact 
> that Chomsky's ideas have changed and developed.
> 
> I guess at some stage you'll come across Joseph Greenberg's 
> 'linguistic universals'; see e.g.
> http://angli02.kgw.tu-berlin.de/Korean/Artikel02/

I have been told that for every single statement on that list,
a counterexample has been found by now.  At any rate, language
typologists have become cautious about making apodictic 
statements about what occurs in language and what not, and
prefer talking about typological *tendencies* - things that are
repeatedly and significantly frequently occur in languages, but
admit occasional exceptions.

> Also David Bickerton's "language bioprogram hypothesis"; and 
> I am sure there are many others.

Bickerton's notion that creole languages implement a "default
setting" of the "language organ" is in my opinion ridiculous.
If there is such a "bioprogram", why then are there so many
languages which show a different structure?  Also, the notion
that all creole languages are very similar to each other in
their structure holds only for creoles based on western
European languages (while creoles based on non-European
languages are far more "exotic"), and the similarities can
be explained simply by noting that the European languages
such as English, Dutch or Portuguese are typologically
similar in many regards to the point that some linguists
(e.g., Martin Haspelmath) speak of a European sprachbund;
also, even the European-based creoles aren't really isomorphic,
but in each of them, some features are found that are found
only in a minority of all European-based creole language.
In short, the whole bioprogram notion is contradicted by
the facts to such a large degree that we can safely forget
about it.

> But it should be remembered that the notion of 'universal 
> grammar' is controversial; some feel the universal grammar 
> theories (there's more than one) are unfounded or, at best, 
> unprovable.

Indeed.  Surely, humans have some sort of innate faculty for
learning language (what Pinker called the "language instinct"),
and this faculty imposes limits on the grammatical structures
we can cope with (e.g., it rules out excessive multi-level
center-embedding); but it is very doubtful and probably
unprovable that there is a set of hard-wired context-free rules
which encode "Universal Grammar" while the particularities
of individual languages are accounted for by acquired context-
sensitive rules which transform the categories of UG into the
categories of the concrete language's grammar (this is, at
least, what I understand the original concept of Universal
Grammar to break down to; but I may have misunderstood
something).

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