Tricks of the linguist
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry about this one:
Most linguists worship Noam Chomsky. It is so extreme that often Chomsky will comprise 75% of the references in a linguist’s article and the peer review board will think nothing of it. However, Chomsky is prolific, and almost not linguists have has read all of his writings. So if you challenged by a peer on some point, they can usually say “I believe Chomsky wrote that somewhere…” and it will usually shut the challenger up. The only thing they have to be careful about are those linguists who hate Noam Chomsky — a small but fiesty bunch.
But I can be pretty certain which group this guy person (I misread Matthew as the author; Matthew is defectiveyeti Matthew) is in. (And I’ve never seen journal articles with that much Chomsky-cite, except perhaps his own. Squibs? Maybe. Handouts or course papers? Absolutely.)
September 28th, 2004 at 10:00 pm
Um … what does Chomsky have to say about the construction “almost not linguists have has read all of his writings”?
That could be taken as evidence that language is not innate after all, and the author has not acquired it….
September 29th, 2004 at 5:23 am
You beat me to it. That looks like something that’s been through the Google translator a few times… The rest is reasonably literate, though. Just really stupid.
September 29th, 2004 at 9:36 am
Well, it’s been partially corrected on the site, but it annoyed me a little (the style of it, the actual trick is pretty much true, if limited strictly to syntax, people would laugh me out of the field if I tried to get away with something in phonology by saying “I think Chomsky once said . . . “), so I’ll let the author continue to sound like an idiot.