Chomsky wrong on language?

Hang on!  No serious academic linguist outside Chomksy's immediate circle has taken his theories seriously for decades, as the mountain of papers demolishing his views demonstrates.  I say 'views' in the plural because as each of his theories has proved unworkable he has simply responded by producing another one.  If you are talking about disproof of his theory, it has to be asked 'which one'?  His theory of universal grammar is probably the best known outside academia.  Yet few people realise that this has long since been thoroughly discredited. In fact, Chomsky has never been able to produce a single 'universal' rule to which there are no exceptions.  He retains a level of pre-eminence only because he is backed by funding and support from The Pentagon. Through this, and through this alone, he has achieved an unassailable position which bears no relation to the lack of support which his theories actually attract. All it means is that other linguists are obliged to identify their views in relation to (and usually in opposition to) his.  He is a kind of touchstone, but is hardly anyone's guru.It seems that few leftists or socialists actually understand Chomsky's reputation within academia or his  relationship with the Pentagon.  I've only begun to get a grip on it myself in recent months.  The fact that the Pentagon has been the main paymaster for his research is, as Chomsky would say, completely uncontroversial. Chomsky recognises it in the acknowledgement section of every book on linguistics he writes. The Pentagon funds him to do research into the supposed underlying universal grammar of language (a kind of human linguistic machine code) because of its potential use in developing computer systems to control American weapons programmes.  As Chomsky himself would say, there is noting controversial about this.  He refers to 'The Language Lab', the MIT department where the Pentagon first set him up as 'The Death Lab' in recognition of its intended purpose.  He has frequently sought to justify his work there by claiming that pure research cannot be held responsible for the use to which it is put.   Chomksy's theories of language have always been bizarre in the extreme.  He believes, for instance, that language did not evolve in humans over time but was installed instantaneously, whole and complete, in the mind of a human ancestor at some unspecified moment in our distant past. When asked how this occurred, Chomsky has always declined to be specific, but when pushed, replies with a metaphor:  It was, he has said, as though our ancester had been hit by a 'cosmic ray shower'.  From this moment our minds contained not only all the grammer we would ever need or use, but also every concept.  For Chomsky, the concept 'carburetor', for example,  did not emerge culturally in response to developments in machine engineering but was, like all other concepts, installed in our minds millennia back in that initial moment of langague acquisition.  ('Carburetor' is Chomsky's own chosen example, by the way, not mine.)  Chomsky also believes that language has nothing to do with communication.  It purpose, he claims is to provide us with a means of talking to ourselves in the privacy of our own heads.Although Chomsky has produced one bizarre version of this linguistic theory after another throughout his career, all of them thave one interesting thing in common, they all deny the idea that language has any social origin or any social application or function – perfect for a machine code, but not a very good model to explain how it actually functions in human society.      

HI Adam.  No Chris is not a conspiracy theorist (or is that a cover-up theorist?) by any stretch of the imagination, and he has a strong regard for Chomsky as a political commentator.  His aim is to explain this apparent conflict, not to resolve it by writing him off as an Pentagon insider.  His conclusions are much more interesting and consequential than that.  But you will have to wait for the book…

Hud955,again, it's not that absurd, from an evolutionary perspective, given that language is (arguably) irreducibly complex, to come to a view that some other function has been repurposed, and language was absically born 'intact'.  If one accepts the argument by lack of data, and therefore the language acquisition device, it pretty much follows that language did not emerge from the same route a monkey howls and doesn't represent a continuation of the same.Afterall, the article cited is Chomsky's own work, so should represent an 'authoritative' example of his actual views.It is consistent with the essentailly chaotic character of the theory of evolution.

No, indeed not.  Tattersall is one of Chomsky's true believers and has collaborated on various pieces of research with him.

Just to add to that:"the anatomically recognizable species Homo sapiens was well established long before any population of it began to show indications of behaving symbolically."Recent evidence for the  earliest origins of human symbolic thought, especially in Africa is pushing back the date all the time.  This claim can no longer be taken for granted.   It has always caused problems.

 "Not that the cocnept of carburetor was born fully formed one hundred thousand years ago, but that the concept emerges within the mind before the word.  At least, thats my reading, on aquick scan of the lit."Absolutely, but in Chomsky's view, the concept not only precedes the word, it also precedes any possible experience to which either the concept or the word could be related.  You don't have to hold a crude referential theory of meaning to see the absurdity of this.  The problem Chomksy has always had seems to lie in his underlying agenda, which is to deny that language has any social content whatsoever.  There are currently quite a few theories about the origins of language acquistion, which avoid the kind of absrudist implications that have always been a hallmark of Chomsky's writings.   Several  linguists are now arguing that we learn language through a statistical process,  for instance.  Vyvan Evans at Bangor has recently published the latest blast against Chomsky.  He believes that language can be explained without any 'innate' characteristics at all, which seems to me to be going a bit too far in the opposite direction, but not having read his book I can't really comment.  What I do know is that if you are not careful, an apparently rational conceptual cascade can lead you in all kinds of absurd directions till, before you know it,  you can be insisting that the moon is made of green cheese.