Gravity is also counterintuitive --- Newton called it "occult" --- but, so what?
To say that is not especially useful is vague at best. Not useful for what? For writing better rebuttals to someone's vague arguments? Perhaps not. Better for understanding how language develops and operates? I beg to differ...
> .... It's a neat trick that
>works in English, but becomes less and less productive the further you
>get away from English. ...
I see. You have discovered a way to measure linguistic distance. Please elucidate.
Aside from this problem, it has been shown to apply to a variety of languages, from Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, BVE, and a host of others.
> .... Chomsky's followers have difficulty claiming
>much empirical basis for GG ...
This I find hard to swallow. From what I have read, there is plenty of evidence, some of it adduced by Chomsky in his various publications on the topic, some of it elsewhere.
> ... and haven't made any real progress in
>understanding the functioning of human language on this basis.
They seem to have carried the understanding of the functioning of human language quite a distance from where it stood 40 years ago.
>A scientific theory should have some empirical means of falsification,
>but Chomsky encourages linguists to treat introspection as a form of
>validation for their hypotheses. That's pretty bad. Nobody else
>wants much to do with Cartesianism. As far as I can tell it thrives
>only in Anglo-American linguistics.
This is nonsense. Please provide us a quote from Chomsky where he seriously "encourages linguists to treat introspection as a form of validation for their hypotheses". Chomsky has written repeatedly that linguistic structures are *beyond* introspection and must be verified by other means.
>Among other problems, Chomsky rigidly refuses to consider semantics in
>analysing grammar, ignoring important phenomena like lexical functions
>and treating grammar as simply an arbitrary way of ordering words
>without any reference to what those words mean. Obviously syntactic
>phenomena reflect meaning. His "furious green ideas" can be
>meaningful in an appropriate context - they do not reflect the
>independence of syntax from meaning.
This again, from what I have read, is false. He does not treat "grammar as simply an arbitrary way of ordering words without any reference to what those words mean." Perhaps his "dry, uninspiring" prose style has forced you to drop the book before you finished it...
Bill