Steven Den Beste links to Amritas with a long post on Chomsky's linguistic theories and language in general. He proposes the following test of Chomsky’s theories:
Several supporters of Chomsky's theory (perhaps even including Chomsky himself, if he were willing to participate) would be given texts in several languages and would independently analyze them to derive the deep structure behind them. Their analyses would then be compared. If their analyses closely agreed, it would strongly support the validity of their theory. If they didn't agree at all, it would mean they were living in an intellectual home made of smoke and mirrors.
I have no doubt that Chomsky's theories would pass this test. The reason for this is that, as I understand it, Chomsky’s Universal Grammar is not really a grammar at all, but a meta-grammar – a grammar for describing grammars. It is akin to BNF, as Steven describes it:
We programmers have precise meta-language conventions for description of grammars, and one of the most common is called Backus-Naur Form, or BNF. BNF itself is thus a grammar, in a sense, but it is a very limited one which is entirely descriptive. BNF contains exactly one verb: "Is defined as" (which in BNF is spelled ::=).
The question therefore, as I understand it, is not to ask “is it true”, but to ask, “can it really describe all grammars?” If the answer is yes (actually the answer needs only to be: yes under such-and-such conditions) then we can ask, “How is it useful?” This is not a question that needs to be answered unequivocally; after all “useful” is not a well-defined term itself. If linguists use it, then it can be said to be useful.
This is also the reason that Chomskianism seems so much like a religion. Outside of linguistics you often find the same phenomenon: Java programmers vs. C programmers vs. BASIC programmers, Mac users vs. Linux users vs. Windows users. Or even: motorcycle riders vs. car drivers. Human beings are by nature tool-using animals, and the tools we use to interact with the world become integral to our perception of it. And “our perception of the world” is as good a definition of religion as any.
The real question is: is it worth the money that has been poured into it? I don’t see endless work being done on new forms of BNF. Granted, human languages are much more complex, but I think that after a while we reach a point of diminishing returns. Perhaps the efforts of linguists might be better applied elsewhere.
UPDATE: The real problem is that Chomsky’s followers don’t want Universal Grammar to be merely useful; they want it to be the truth.
Posted by David Boxenhorn at May 13, 2004 03:18 PM