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| quote: | Originally posted by Woony
I know very little about linguistics except some of the basics of structuralism, is Chomskyian linguistics = universal grammar? |
Here's a brief summary:
In the late 50's, Noam Chomsky's advisor (Zellig Harris) was analysing language structures, which surely is a good way to see how languages work without getting tangled with the thorny issues surrounding word meanings and the like. Chomsky then had a great idea - what if all languages share a common structure, and that's why kids pick up languages so quickly? That common grammar is what came to be called a "universal grammar".
It was the right idea at the right time. The computer revolution was just getting started, and Chomsky's idea that kids are born with a language parser went hand in glove with the idea that computers could simulate the human mind. It was a bloody good idea, gotta give him that. No wonder it spread so rapidly.
And that's when the difficulties began to pile up. I come from a field called "language typology" and we study language diversity. Often times, the diversity is so overwhelming we have a lot difficulty finding universals (which you'd expect to find if there was a thing such as a language universal, let alone a whole universal grammar). Chomskyians start from the assumption that syntactic structures are universal, so when confronted with this diversity, the standard reply is that there are underlying structures and/or that the really universal bit is something so simple as recursion. I had a lot of fun making structures up on exercises whenever I had to explain away something that only happened in a native American language, for example, so I'm quite sceptical about these underlying structures. As for recursion, the Pirahã language arguably lacks recursive constructions altogether, reason it became such a heated topic of debate in linguistics.
In my view, the difference between psychoanalysis and Chomskyan linguistics is that one of them has a penchant for formalism. But, just as one seems to be able to explain everything away with the unconscious, so does the other, really 
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