Has Chomsky advanced linguistics?
Surely the headline question has many aspects, and a short post can't take the mission of answering it correctly. Yet I am going to look into one quite recent paper published by Chomsky and three of his followers, to find out that the Chomskyan school is wrong in the most basics of language. The paper is titled "How could language have evolved?" It seems to propose some of the important failures of the Chomskyan theory. Take the use they do with "faculty of language". Is there a department - which is the meaning of "faculty" - of language in the human body, brain, or elsewhere? why no one other than the Chomskyans speaks of any "faculty" in the human sciences? The answer is quite simple. No one other than Chomsky regards language as a department. Rather it is regarded as a collective name of fitness and capability of producing meaningful patterns by voice, writing or signing. The common perception of language shared by most people and ...