User:Yaamin ali

TheChomsky Challenge By I refer you to the latest (Winter2004) issue of Linguistic Inquiry,which is a publication of the MIT department of linguistics, and which heavilypromotes Chomskyan theory. (When he is not busy trashing his country, Chomskyis employed by MIT as a professor of linguistics.)

linking theory…the anti-c-commandrequirement…A-positions…the Bijection Principle…weakest crossover configurations…boundvariable anaphora…asymmetric linking…licensing conditions…the index of apronoun…null operator analysis…variable binding…configurationalconditions…inappropriate and appropriate antecedents…etc….etc….

Now let’s look at a couple ofdifferences between Sentences 1 and 2:

In both cases, who and whom are both objects of the preposition to.

Who(m) will be easyfor us to get his mother to talk to?

If, in Sentence 1, who(m) is not a subject, where is thesubject of the verb phrase will be easy?

Sentence 2: It will be easy for us to get his mother to talk to whom? Of course it should. Sentence 3 isgrammatical. Sentence 1, the subject of so much scrutiny and theoreticaldiscussion by the Chomskyans over a period of decades, is in factungrammatical.

Now I certainly wouldn’t expect aninth grader to know that Sentence 1 is wrong and Sentence 3 is right, butcertainly a good newspaper copy editor would know it, as would many collegeEnglish instructors.

It would be unfair, I think, todisparage in any way the graduate students and assistant professors who seem tobe trying so hard to make sense out of Chomsky’s theoretical musings. Clearly, they are acting out of a sense of conviction that he is leading them in the right direction. But I think it says a lot when someone of Chomsky’s stature is so clearly ignorant of the workings of his own language that he allows not just one but several elementary mistakes to go uncorrected for years and years –mistakes which, if corrected, could allow his acolytes to make strides in solving this and other problems.

Chomsky's Linguistics Refuted By

The idea that there was no point in continuing the battle because ultimately it was a matter of individual judgment is a notion that is at the heart of Chomskyan linguistic theory. The scientific methodology upon which Chomskyan linguistics is based is the idea that whatever a native speaker of a language “feels” to be right is grammatical. In other words, grammaticality is determined by personal intuition. This doctrine has become so thoroughly ingrained in the dominant schools of modern linguistics that no one questions it, and yet it has got to be one of the goofiest ideas ever recorded in the long annals of science. This idea runs counter to all the hard sciences, which require that evidence be paramount. What would the field of physics, or chemistry, or mathematics look like if personal intuition trumped considerations of evidence?

Consider as well a native Russian living in America who has been speaking English for years and is fully conversant. The Russian may have heard Americans use definite articles a myriad of times and yet the Russian says, “I have key to apartment.” and he would feel this to be grammatical, since the Russian language does not use articles, as English does. (The Russian feels no more need to say “the key” or “the apartment” than we do to say “the France”, although if we were speaking French we would have to add the article to be correct.) Since we can easily understand what the Russian means, and since he feels that he is expressing all the necessary ideas without the use of articles, then, again by the Chomskyan methodology, the Russian must be speaking grammatical English.

And yet neither the child nor the Russian is speaking grammatical English, because English requires that subjects be in the nominative and that specificity be indicated by articles or other means.

Or consider the NPR announcer who recently said, “The Ukrainian government will allow whom ever wants to vote…” No doubt “whomever” sounded acceptable to the NPR announcer, but he ought to have checked before inflicting such an excruciating construction on millions of listeners. (“ want” has to have a subject. Thus: allow… those who want/anyone who wants/whoever wants…to vote.)

Or consider the following well-known grammatical phenomenon. There are many people who would never say, “Me went to the races.” but who would nevertheless say, “Me and Larry went to the races.” According to Chomskyan precepts, both are grammatical because they both would seem to be intuitively correct to some speakers. Now if both sentences are grammatical, then we should be able to extract a rule which governs this situation. The rule would have to be something like this: ‘A single subject pronoun must be in the nominative case, but a pair of subject pronouns may be in the accusative case.’ The problem with this rule is that there is no logical reason that the number of subjects should determine the case of the subjects, and so we are forced to conclude that the scientific methodology of Chomskyan theory leads us to the formulation of grammatical rules which are unsupported by logic. And so this house of cards must fall.

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I should further comment that this notion - that any human utterance is grammatical as long as the speaker thinks that it is - breeds a kind of anti-intellectualism, whereby there is no particular compulsion to rigorously discern whether a structure is grammatical. We need only discern whether the speaker thinks it is acceptable, and then an attempt is made to create a grammatical framework which incorporates it.

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Proof: That the following sentence is ungrammatical: “Who will be easy for us to get his mother to talk to?”

In (5) It is easy to cause. and (6) It is easy to be caused, we can allow “it” to take the place of” avalanche”. The subject “it” refers to semantic content: avalanche.

6. If we take the sentence “Bob will be easy to get.” and add “his mother to talk to” then the verb “to get” has an object which is grammatically expressed: his mother. Note, however, that if the object of “to get” is grammatically expressed, then it must be the same as the logical object (See 4(c) above.) But “Bob” and “his mother” do not refer to the same person, so we have a logical impossibility. The only way to allow the logical object and the grammatical object to refer to the same thing is to have the subject become semantically empty, as in (7). But the subject cannot become semantically “emptied” of Bob because that semantic content has no place to go since Bob is not the same person as his mother. But if “his mother” follows “to get”, then the verb means “to cause.” Thus, the verb has two meanings within the same sentence, and that is a third grammatical impossibility. You've no doubt heard this question raised: “Why do people take so seriously the political commentary of a language professor?” The standard answer is that Noam Chomsky is simply taking a page out of Einstein's book, using his academic stature or notoriety as a political platform.

However, if you step back and look at his linguistic theories – stepping back far enough to see the forest, not just the trees – there is something that will become dimly apparent – and then perhaps obvious: the linguistic theories form themselves into a cohesive whole which supports not just a scientific theory, but a political one as well. Furthermore, if you look at a competing view of language – one which Chomsky systematically ignores, although there is massive evidence to support it – you will see that the competing theory supports not just a scientific but a political view which Chomsky finds abhorrent.

Now it is easy enough to revile Chomsky for some of his most blatant misrepresentations of fact in the arena of historical or political commentary, and I take a back seat to no one in my contempt for many of his perversions of the truth. However, today I come not to revile Chomsky, but to deconstruct him.

There has always been an assumption that Chomsky’s work in linguistics represents one arena of his intellectual interests, and that his work in political commentary represents another. I mean to show a different view, namely that they are one and the same. Thus:

• His ideas in linguistics are subsumed under a single overarching idea; • That overarching idea aligns perfectly with his political views; • His ideas in linguistics are novel and innovative, although flawed and ultimately unpersuasive; • There is a competing view of language – and a more powerful approach, I would argue – for which ample evidence abounds, but which has no place in Chomsky’s philosophy of language; • The overarching idea behind the competing view is aligned with a political idea that Chomsky abhors.

In short, leaving aside his work that is openly political, his linguistics theory doesn’t merely represent bad science; rather, it happens to be politics masquerading as bad science.

I’ll give Chomsky a tip of the hat: to have allowed people to believe all this time that the linguistics was separate from the politics was – as the British say –“Fiendishly clever.”

It’s the damnedest thing you’ve ever seen. And he almost got away with it.

Part One. The age of Aquarius.

If you had arrived as a student on the campus of one of the elite universities of the northeastern United States in the 1960s, you would have encountered a campus life much different from that which students of the 1950s experienced. You would have been much more likely to be introduced to casual drug use; the “pill” was breaking down social barriers; the dominant political story of the day would have been the growing involvement of the U.S. in Vietnam, and the growing opposition to that war on the university campuses.

One of the most controversial figures discussed on those campuses was Robert MacNamara, the General Motors “whiz kid” who, as the new secretary of defense, was going to bring efficiency and order to the prosecution of the war in Vietnam. High intellect and supreme self-confidence were the salient qualities of those, such as MacNamara, who were deemed the “best and the brightest” and who had confidence that American technology and a rational approach to war fighting would bring eventual victory in the dark jungles of Southeast Asia.

And ifyou had arrived on campus with the idea of studying linguistics – the scienceof language – a revolution-ary new paradigm would have been awaiting you thereas well. You might have been pleasantly surprised to find that the oldprescriptivism had been jettisoned in favor of the thoroughly modern descriptivism. What this meant

Part Three. Inconvenient facts. Universal1: Languagechoice, acquisition, and development is heavily influenced by inequalities in relationships,such that the less powerful person tends to learn the language of the morepowerful person:

• Infants thrive, in part, bylearning the language of those upon whom they are totally dependent for theirsurvival;

• Students succeed by conforming tothe language standards set by teachers and others in authority;

• Those who wish to rise incorporations, military organizations or in general society learn the vernacularacceptable to and understood by those who are higher up in those hierarchies;

• A slave learns the language ofhis master; rarely does the master learn the language of the slave;

• Those who wish to do businesswith the wealthy and the powerful learn to attune their grammar, pronunciation,style and usage to conform to the language of the wealthy and the powerful;