Sticking this up as a compilation (ever expanding) of all the material I've read and would recommend you read to get a handle on the criticisms of the linguistic ideas of Chomsky. This isn't just intended to be a criticism of Chomsky personally, but also the manner of linguistics that he engendered (basically anyone that uncritically cites Chomsky as a source on the nature of language). I have ordered these by date of publication in an effort to get across how long this has been around for.
I've tried to find publically accessible links where possible, but unfortunately not everything is so available even though it should be, so I've linked in some cases to JSTOR or similar (you might be able to get a copy if you e.g. request through researchgate but that might be it if you can't get Sci-Hub to work). Also, I've not directly linked to any PDF files, so for some of these you might have to do a little crawling through a long list of publications to find them, though that should be easier given these things are usually ordered by year, a piece of information I've given you.
I do expect to be adding to this post, so expect regular updates, as well as it being pinned on my blog.
What Did John Keep the Car That was In? (1972) - in merely six pages Dwight Bolinger Destroys Chomsky's Argument (in the New Yorker) with Facts and Logic (specifically making an early point that polar question inversion doesn't make the point Chomskyans want you to think it makes).
Cognitive versus Generative Linguistics: how commitments influence results (1990) - George Lakoff (the metaphor guy), gives his take on how the baseline assumptions of the generative model influence the results that emerge from its research.
Concerning the generative paradigm (1994) - Esa Itkonen's comprehensive criticism, including a criticism of e.g. generativism's conception of what 'Language' is, as well as the more specific points about acquisition, UG etc.
Grammaticality as evidence and as prediction in a Galilean linguistics (2009) - Nick Riemer makes a specific criticism of the notion of grammaticality in the context of Chomskyan argumentation. Follow-up after Chomskyan complaining is On not having read Itkonen: empiricism and intuitions in the generative data debate (2009), continuing the point.
The Incoherence of Chomsky's 'Biolinguistic' Ontology (2009) - Paul Postal gives his take on Chomsky's claims to being based in biology (note Postal is problematic in many ways, especially politically; I think on this one he has the right points, but I thought it worth noting).
Why Chomsky doesn’t count as a gifted linguist (2010) - a post from Dominik Lukeš that makes the point explicit, and provides alternative suggestions of actually good linguists who have had a positive impact on the field
Pullum sobre Chomsky en la UCL (2011) - Geoffrey K Pullum reports (in English, contra the title) on a talk given by Chomsky and outlines the major flaws in his rhetorical argumentation (and I mean rhetorical, there's not much in the way of actual argumentation, as you'll see)
What Chomsky doesn't get about child language (2012) - child development academic Dorothy Bishop lays out the problems with Chomsky's perspective on acquisition and how it has been superseded by pretty much all of the research by actual acquisition specialists in the decades since.
On the logical necessity of a cultural and cognitive connection for the origin of all aspects of linguistic structure (2015) - Randy LaPolla points out how odd it is to claim that Language isn't influenced by extralinguistic factors.
What exactly is UG and has anyone seen it? (2015) - Ewa Dąbrowska's title says it all with this one, arguing that part of the problem with UG as a hypothesis is that it is so vague that none of its proponents seem to actually agree on what it is, as well as debunking the key (so-called) arguments in favour.
The description-comparison approach and the audacious Chomskyan approach (or: how to frame better) (2023) - not technically anti-Chomskyan per se, but rather Haspelmath trying to frame/put a name to the overall camp that he (and many others such as myself) reside in.
Linguistics question: I know Maltese is a weird language by virtue of having an Afro-Asiatic (specifically Arabic) grammar and a mostly Indo-European (specifically Italian) vocabulary, but are there any other languages which are a mix of two language families like this?
Maltese is not a 'mixed language' in the way that linguists usually (try to) define them; there's still a metric ton of Semitic lexicon in addition to the Indo-European material. If Maltese is a 'mixed' language like this, then frankly Japanese and Korean should be considered Japonic-Sinitic and Koreanic-Sinitic 'mixes' respectively
On the other hand, there are absolutely mixed languages out there. Classic examples in the literature include. Michif which mixes French nouns with Cree verbs; Media Lengua, which imposes Quechua morphology onto a Spanish lexicon; and Mednyj Aleut, which is mostly Aleut but inflects verbs using Russian morphology. The Wikipedia article on mixed languages has a longer list.
In the last few years, I moved from the southern US to the northern US. People always joke that people in the south can't handle the cold, or that people in the north can't handle the heat, but I would argue that while upbringing affecting preference is a factor, the more important factor is infrastructure. In Texas, we had lighter, draftier houses that breathed. This helps with heat, but in the winter, if it got down around 15⁰ f (like it usually did up to a couple of times a year), the houses couldn't keep up. It was impossible to heat the indoors over 60⁰, even with blasting the heat. Alternatively, buildings up north don't always have air conditioning, so if it gets up over 95⁰ it is really difficult to handle, especially for prolonged stretches. Climate isn't just personal preference. We have architecture from over the past 100 yrs that is adapted to handle the temps it was before global warming. The architecture in Europe is even older. If people say the temp is untenable, believe them.
By far my favourite 'ridiculous mischaracterisation of Catholic practice as pagan' is the account, derived from Martin Martin's account of a journey to the Hebrides, that the people of the West side of Lewis in the 18th century have this particular habit where they on Midsummers Day come down as a community to the sea, walk into it up to their knees, and sing songs in praise of a certain 'Seonaidh', who he interprets as some kind of water spirit or folk memory of a pre-Christian sea god. This I have seen cited all over as an example of surviving pagan practices, and I have seen people who consider themselves Gaelic Reconstructionists Saving the True Heritage of the Gaels worship this being. There's even a decent-ish trad tune about it, "Seonaidh the water spirit".
Now, those of you who know your church year might know that midsummer's day is also known as the Feast Day of St. John the Baptist, a very big and important celebration especially in medieval Christendom, and might have a guess as to why on earth this group of Christians are going into the water on the Feast Day of St. John the Baptist to sing the praises of one of the two Gaelic forms of the Greek Iohannis, and it doesn't involve a somehow surviving pagan cult for 1,200 years which is somehow also involving the clergy.
The burning question: When she has her hands on either side of her face, right at the start, is this the moment she realized, “I’m gonna have to marry this guy” ?
Every time Sean Astin makes a statement on whether or not Sam and Frodo were indeed gay for each other in lord of the rings he’s always like “well we have to acknowledge that attitudes around sexuality have changed dramatically over the past several decades and since authorial intent is only up to speculation, the story is open to multiple readings, some of which might have different significances for different groups of people also they kiss on the lips because I said so”
Rosie: "This is my husband Sam, and that's his husband, Frodo. Frodo is my husband-in-law. I'm not into him, he's he's a bit too 'elfy' for my taste, but Sam likes him, and that's fine with me. As far as I know, Frodo can't give Sam children, but Frodo looks after ours all the same, so I don't mind sharing Sam if it means another pair of eyes on the wee ones. In all honesty, our family tree is right simple compared to some hobbits. Yes, I'm referrin' to you Lobelia, over there pretendin' you ain't eavesdroppin'. Still bitter you ain't got either of my boys or their house, eh?"
Tbh it's canon that Frodo invited Sam and Rosie to move in to Bag End after their wedding and they all lived there for a couple of years until Frodo went to Valinor, so yeah. Running with it.
And once Rosie dies, Sam says his goodbyes and disappears after him.
what’s funny is people assuming that rosie would somehow be too dim or naive to KNOW that sam loved frodo, instead of looking at a guy who would loyally follow a beloved friend to hell and then help carry him home again, and not be like ‘oh i can’t not fuck that.’
Polyamory, specifically polyandry, would be an interesting solution to the oddball population of the Shire.
The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.
What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.
Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)
Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..
In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.
When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.
Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.
No outsider ever parses hobbit genealogy well enough to understand this except for Gandalf, who never explains anything either.
Since “pledge” kinships are multidimensional and can occur in different directions, hobbits can form - and formalise - family bonds simply because they choose to. Gandalf doesn’t tell anyone that the formation of Thorin’s Company, the Fellowship of the Ring, and Belladonna Took’s Accidental Troop of Mercenaries* are legal formations of pledge-siblings, a hobbit family structure usually claimed to increase social class and prestige (as high numbers of pledge-kin confer distinction on a hobbit, being a sort of popularity vote/endorsement that adds greatly to their social power. Incidentally, this is partly why Bilbo was both controversial and successful in his pledge-claim of Frodo; outsiders mistook his “bachelor” status as someone living outside of heteronormativity, while the Shire was bewildered and increasingly annoyed by his rejection of pledge and hearth commitments. By rights Bilbo had too few pledge-kin, and too little parenting experience, to claim rights to an orphan, especially one from Brandybuck hearth; but conversely, his social status was high enough that his belated bid for his very first pledge-son couldn’t reasonably be denied by anybody.)
In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)
Gandalf never explained.
* see the post about the Old Took’s “enchanted diamond cufflinks” that obeyed the wearer’s commands; which were probably, given the general state of things, two lost silmarils recovered by his Remarkable Daughters and gifted to him because things stay small and safe in the shire
Only through Boromir while Boromir was alive! Pippin’s familial claim through Boromir technically dissolved on Boromir’s death, as Denethor hadn’t been privy to it, and those bonds rarely stretch to a stranger when the person in the middle has died before introducing them; although Pippin, who was well-brought-up, perfectly and politely rectified the problem at once by simply swearing himself as Denethor’s pledge-son. but through his blood-cousinship to Frodo, who was older than Boromir, his status as the Took double-primarc (don’t ask) and the proximity-enhanced status-doubling effects of having a five-way cousin in Merry, Pippin was demonstrably higher status as a pledge-sibling and was also his own father-in-law and approved of himself. As such, he would have significantly raised Boromir’s social status and marital prospects in the Shire.
Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .
Ironically, the events in which Pippin realized this made Faramir his own hearth-son - so Pippin won in the end and took a great interest in ceremonially approving of Eowyn. Gandalf never explained
I love how @elodieunderglass had multiple posts of very in-depth genealogical discussions pointing out myriad implications and solutions all caused by adventuring parties being legally family under Shire law, and then ends each one with "Gandalf never explained". You bet your ass he never explained. Probably kept that information to himself to drop on people when they least expected it.
Gandalf: so, are you going to visit your counts on fingers brother's second son, Merry?*
Aragorn: splutters in confusion
*I think I have that correct for Sam's son? Or is it a more complicated relationship?
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since there is such an "english speakers who don't even try to pronounce a foreign mame correctly" epidemic, native english speakers often try to overcorrect and end up thinking they have a moral imperative to pronounce every foreign name correctly at all times. so i'm gonna hold your hand and look into your eyss as i say this: you can't. you can't pronounce every sound in a language you don't speak. and that's fine. it happens to the rest of us too. we won't be mad so long as you try your best.
“I did some research to pronounce this name correctly” = 👍 great! even if the pronunciation was still off (and learning to pronounce a foreign language correctly takes a lot of practice) people generally appreciate it when someone goes the extra mile for accuracy, and honestly, languages are cool
“I’m probably not saying that correctly”/“sorry for my pronunciation” = 👍 understandable! foreign languages often have sounds that aren’t used in English and learning to correctly pronounce unfamiliar phonemes is genuinely difficult even with help
“lol I’m not even gonna TRY to pronounce that 😂” = 👎 THIS is the problem, if treats languages other than English like they are inherently ‘weird’ or ‘overly complicated’ just because you aren’t familiar with them
“One thousand apologies for my butchering of this beautiful effervescent tongue, I will now flagellate myself as punishment for my crimes” = 👎 chill
“It’s digestible” is pertinent!! Okay, for those of you who haven’t researched Crisco for writing fic about gay sex in the mid-late 60s:
The first-edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, declared, “Vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant, since it is not only greasy but also digestible”[4] Such a statement perhaps gives new meaning to the companies boastful declarations that “Its digestible” and “Crisco has been making life in the kitchen more delicious for years.” Similarly, in the 1978 sex manual The Advocate Guide to Gay Health, Crisco even earned an entry in the book’s index. Discussions of the shortening’s use as an anal lubricant indicate its popularity, with statements such as: “The lubricant, typically the cultic Crisco, must be copious.”[5] In fact, Crisco was so synonomus with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, such as Crisco Disco in New York City, which was one of the premiere clubs during the 1970s and early 1980s. Other clubs or bathhouses, such as Club Z in Seattle, even featured murals with Crisco. Thus, Crisco was conversely also one of many things that led to the formation of gay identities during the 20th century.
from this essay: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/drew2.html
Love this post for so many reasons but most especially because this is from all the way back in 2012 and and yet not a single blog in this thread is deactivated
Love the gay history, but i just wanna correct that the “it’s digestible” in the gay stuff was a reference to crisco’s tagline it had been using since 1911, the actual meaning of its digestible is because it’s main competition came from “enhanced” lards which were rendered pig fat mixed with non food thickeners that literally did not digest and caused people to basically just shit out pig cream, since crisco was veggie based the body digested it along with the food
This post is the opposite of net zero information. Not only did I learn several new facts about gay history but also we rounded our way back to the original question of the tag line and the mini obelisks.
One of the most fucked up parts of America’s for-profit medical system and insurance often being tied to your work is that you cannot work if you are sick and if you are not working, you have no insurance. People are fired in the middle of cancer treatment or a severe mental health episode and suddenly there is no way to pay the hospital and buy the medicine you need. Republicans will outright say “You don’t deserve free healthcare if you’re lazy and unemployed.” anytime someone mentions this, actively ignoring the fact that you often cannot work when you are sick and shouldn’t be forced to work when you’re sick to be able to afford to get better.
And you will notice that they always refer to it as ‘free healthcare’, not taxpayer funded healthcare, not socialized medicine, not single-payer healthcare, always ‘free healthcare’, like it is an fantastical idea, like healthcare for all is as absurd as a 5 bedroom mansion with a pool for all. They need to make it sound like it is logistically impossible, like they could not take a fraction of the money in the DOD’s $2.5 trillion budget and make sure no one in America dies of an easily treatable illness just because they can’t work. It is very intentional.
