/lit/ - Literature

>>20095855
I never quite understand why people say this as his principles and parameters approach is still the dominant paradigm in instruction of undergraduate linguistics classes on generative grammar. The text I learned generative grammar from cites Chomsky in literally every single chapter. His most cited work ever is the 2014 version of his Aspects, and pic rel demonstrates that Chomsky's citations are only growing. It's such a baseless claim that anyone who invokes "chomsky's ideas have been discredited and are no longer en vogue in academic linguistics" discredits only themselves.
Nonetheless, Chomsky's ideas could prove to be empirically and theoretically invalid, and saying "chomsky has been debunked" would be about as insightful and informative as "aristotle has been debunked".
>>20095671
You may as well ask if Newton is worthwhile. Chomsky is one of the ten most cited intellectuals in history; that's a list which ranks him in influence among Freud, Hegel, and Aristotle. There is of course some recency bias in the volume of citations he's received and his position of comparative influence will not persist decades from now. And it is true that Noam Chomsky no longer has a stranglehold on like 4 different academic disciplines. Nonetheless he will forever be remembered as one of the 3 or 4 most penetrating and dynamic thinkers of the 20th century.
It is very uncommon to find intellectuals who completely repudiate their previous work. It is virtually unheard of to find someone who does this 3 times. The straightforward transformational program of Syntactic Structures was upended by the quasi-mysticism of Aspects of Syntactic Structures. His Lectures on Government and Binding pivoted his thought towards the principles and parameters approach (which holds that the deep structure of language consists of a number of abstract laws with different parameters which are like switches turned on or off depending on a particular language) and he ended the most innovative part of his career by introducing the minimalist program. But the independent thinkers on this board are blind to all of this because Chosmky criticized the US government.