/lit/ - Literature

>>7934317
prior to chomsky, American linguistics was dominated by two opposing groups, american structuralists and behavioralists. chomsky's first claim to fame was a review of the behavioralist bf skinner's "verbal behavior." that's not much of a surprise, because chomsky was trained in structuralist linguistics, which opposed the behavioralists anyway. regardless, the review was pretty scathing and left the behavioralists in a pretty weird position of actually not having much ground to stand on.
the next thing chomsky did was publish syntactic structures, which was a continuation of an unpublished manuscript called "logical structure of linguistic theory." syntactic structures was all about why the structuralists had it wrong too. that left the structuralists in the same position as the behavioralists; a lot of people, especially students at the time, felt that both schools of thought were severely lacking. that meant that when chomsky started coming out with his own stuff, like in "aspects of the theory of syntax," (there were some general things in syntactic structures as well, but aspects is the more influential in shaping chomskyan linguistics), there were a lot of people eager to get on board.

>>7443851
>>7442569
chomsky is right about UG.
>the poverty of stimulus argument.
if you don't know what that is, or you think it has been discredited, see
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~jlegate/tlr_legateyang.pdf