> Michael Smith wrote:
> >
> > What was novel about Chomsky's project was the attempt to
> > gain a better understanding of whatever it is in our heads
> > that enables us to speak in the first place.
> >
> Could you unpack this a little bit?
I can try, though I haven't been active in the field for quite a while and so this is very broad-brush.
Chomsky argued that for languages to be learnable at all, they needed to have follow certain formal constraints. He postulated that these constraints derive from the nature of the computing machinery (for lack of a better word) inside our physical heads that we employ when we do language.
He made no claims at all about how that machinery worked but he made what I would say were some strong, testable, non-trivial claims about what the resulting constraints were. Some of these claims seem to have been influenced by work that was going on at the time in computing, and thus had a certain a priori plausibility -- he didn't just pull 'em out of the air.
The result was a very exciting couple of decades in which we gained a much better and deeper understanding of languages as formal systems, and developed new categories and tools for describing and analyzing the formal properties of language. (Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.)
Naturally Chomsky's first stab at defining the constraints was quickly found to be oversimplified, to say the least (and his opponents would say, anything from tautological to trivial to nonsensical). His own work has gone through several cycles of what some would call refinement and others obfuscation.
My personal take is that maybe he was our Copernicus and we're still waiting for our Kepler. Or maybe he was more like our Darwin, who was clearly right about the big picture but left plenty of work for others to do, and whose own picture was wanting in some important respects. The name Karl Marx comes to mind as well.
But the idea that he had a bad effect on the field just seems laughable to me.
Now I'm off to do my reluctant homework on Kenneally. I fear that I'm descending from Olympus to Boeotia, but Henwood expects that every man will do his duty. And if I have to eat my words, I will.
--
Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org