What has given some urgency to this situation is that, coming around the corner from sixty seven to sixty eight, I am beginning to realize that my time is running out. I have a solid idea of what I want to write. I even have it largely finished, although it needs quite a bit of work. I just have to get it out there.
The book, Vowels in an Elevator, is about finding the science in language and language change, in a situation where Chomsky has largely been defeated but nobody has risen to take his place.
By defeated I mean that though his theories still reign in the world of teaching linguistics, his sixty-year search for language universals has been reduced to the idea that human language has "recursion" while many or most animal languages don't have it. As I do with most of his ideas, I question such things immediately and wonder several things. First, who says animals can't do recursion? Who can prove it? If we don't know what dolphins are saying, how can we know they don't have recursion?
Second, if recursion is a language's being able to refer to itself, a layering of symbolism as it were, then what we are saying is that humans at least as we know them now have enough braind power, or gave themselves enough brain power, to keep track of such things (such as, My friends Peter and Paul married Joan and Mary, respectively), thus having a characteristic of reference and keeping track that supposedly animals can't do. But there is nothing special grammatically about this. It negates all his previous ideas about how grammar was some kind of magical characteristic that we were genetically programmed to be able to figure out, and this genetic magical characteristic (the Language Acquisition Device) was programmed with all these restrictions or laws that somehow just appeared in our genetic programming. All that turns out to be hogwash, which is what I suspected from the minute i heard it. It sounded good, and Chomsky sold it worldwide, and people are still spouting it, but it's hogwash.
So what's the truth? Stay tuned and I'll put it forward, as soon as I can.
