Re: What was Noam Chomsky's contribution to *LINGUISTICS*?

Alex Drummond wrote:
>
> Brian M. Scott wrote:
> > The idea of studying UG -- or even demonstrating its
> > existence, for that matter -- without looking at a wide
> > range of very different languages is absurd on its face.
>
> It isn't actually, if you accept Chomsky's epistemological argument for
> the existence of UG, but in any case generative grammarians have
> studied a wide range of different languages over the years. Obviously
> Chomsky himself was not initially able to do this, since the
> methodology of generative syntax requires native speakers. (Greenberg,
> for comparison, didn't always have native speaker data for his
> typological studies IIRC.)

So you haven't even read Greenberg's fundamental 1963 Implicational
Typology article?

"Native-speaker intutions" have nothing whatsoever to do with what he
was discovering.

Again you say "a wide range." How wide is that range?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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