I’ve never liked Chomsky, despite never reading anything by him. His ideas are so prevalent in linguistics, at least in American universities, that you don’t really have to read his work to be exposed to his ideas. However, it’s important to me to have a good idea of the context within which ideas have been proposed and developed, so I finally read Syntactic Structures (Chomsky, 1957/2002), which I think encapsulates everything I dislike about Chomsky and the sort of theoretical linguistics that his ideas have led to.

First of all, though, let me say that I do not think Syntactic Structures is a worthless book. Even though I disagree with much of what Chomsky wrote, he did pose some interesting questions, and even that alone gives it value. For instance, Chomsky argued that grammars should be developed using nothing but formal means, disregarding semantics completely (pp. 93-94). There are several reasons why I don’t think this is correct, which I won’t get into here, as my point is simply that this is an interesting question to consider.

What I don’t like about Chomsky and the sort of theoretical linguistics that he spawned is the near complete disregard for empirical evidence for anything. Theoretical linguistics has relied almost entirely on intuitions for its “data”, often the intuitions of linguists themselves, not of informants. Despite Syntactic Structures often being credited as a foundational work for cognitive science, it never once suggests that linguists use things like experimentation to validate their theories as those in other scientific fields dealing with cognition would do, such as psychologists and neuroscientists.

There are two things in Syntactic Structures that I think have given linguists cover to approach their “science” this way:

  1. Chomsky argued that grammars have nothing to do with synthesis or analysis (p. 48)
  2. Chomsky argued that the goal of linguist theory is to develop an evaluation procedure (pp. 50-52)

By synthesis and analysis, Chomsky meant how humans produce language and how they understand language, respectively. He didn’t think that grammars address these questions, which is patently bizarre. What exactly do grammars describe if not one or both of these things? It seems that one is instead engineering how a grammar could work for some imagined artificial being, in which case we don’t need to consider empirical evidence generated by observing or experimenting on real human beings.

As for the evaluation procedure, Chomsky meant that developing a linguistic theory that could tell us if a given grammar is the correct grammar for a given language is too hard, and developing a linguistic theory that could generate a grammar from a corpus is even harder, so we’re better off developing a linguistic theory that simply tells us if one grammar is better than another for describing a given language. And what is the criteria? Simplicity.

The problem with focusing on an evaluation procedure, though, is that this downplays the importance of empirical evidence once again. There’s no need to test human beings to figure out if they employ transformations, for instance; we just need to show that transformations simplify the grammar more than some other proposal would, that other proposal also having been developed without any regard for testing if it actually represents what happens in the heads of human beings.

Ultimately, the direction that Chomsky set out for linguistics in Syntactic Structures seemed to be about how best to engineer an efficient grammar, not how to understand how humans do language. If Chomskyan linguistics actually does explain what humans do, that result is purely accidental, as there’s nothing about how its done that would be able to establish that connection.

Unsurprisingly, what the results of Chomsky’s approach to linguistics seem most useful for is developing speech synthesis and speech analysis software, i.e. engineering. There’s no need for AIs to do language in the same way that humans do language; they simply have to work. And I’m very much happy that they do. I use Google Assistant all the time, and I can’t wait to be able to speak to my house like the crew of the USS Enterprise speaks to their spaceship.

However, as far as advancing linguistics as a science, I think Chomsky’s approach, as set out in Syntactic Structures, has led to a monumental waste of time and resources. Numerous very intelligent and creative linguists have now spent some 60 years essentially playing a puzzle game that has not shed any light whatsoever on how exactly humans do language, and I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Chomsky’s ideas, combined with his enormous influence in the field, are to blame.

Chomsky, N. (2002). Syntactic Structures (2nd ed.). Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. (Original work published 1957)