On Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:15:47 -0400 shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
> it wasn't Chomsky's
> precise statements that stymied people from investigating the evolution of
> language; rather, it was his reputation.
"Investigating the evolution of language" is an oxymoron. There's nothing to investigate -- or rather, no basis on which to investigate it, other than telling each other just-so stories around the sociobiological campfire. I mean, hell, we don't even have a fossil record. All the languages we know anything about from about four millennia ago -- which is the laughably short time horizon of our knowledge -- look just like modern languages. You can't even _extrapolate_.
I haven't read every word Chomsky has ever written, so I can't state with absolute assurance that he's never said anything about the "evolution of language." But I'm quite sure he's utterly indifferent to this kind of empty speculation.
If it's true that the research program that Chomsky launched with _Syntactic Structures_, and dialed up to 11 with _Aspects_, caused people to spend their time on topics where light *could* actually be shed -- rather than sucking their thumbs about "the evolution of language" -- then he did us all a favor.
> But
> given your tendency to snarl about everything and anything related to
> academia, it sure looks kind of funny that all of a sudden you think
> academics aren't capable of being so fans.
Clearly I haven't expressed myself very well. I think academics are capable of any kind of human squalor you care to name, but speaking as a person who was in the linguistics racket during the period of Chomsky's greatest prestige, I can only say that this was not what I experienced. Every punk gunsel in town wanted to go mano-a-mano with the guy, from what I could see.
There's a whole industry of this stuff -- how often has Marx been refuted? Freud? Chomsky it seems has suffered a similar fate. Every so often my not-very-attentive ears catch the report of another popgun discharged at the old boy, usually by somebody who turns out to be a sociobiologist upon closer examination.
Still, I can only talk about what I know from personal experience. Perhaps Chomsky got deified later on, after I bailed out. If so, it's a testament to the ebbing vitality of the field -- which is, in fact, one of the reasons that I bailed out. I'm glad I didn't stick around to see it, if that is indeed what happened.
But hey, I'll read the book already. This is a great compliment to you personally, Shag; you have delighted me a great deal in the time I've spent on lbo-talk. In my sunset years I don't spend much time on anything I'm not *certain* to enjoy.
But for you... I'll make an exception.
--
Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org