The Unfinished Chomskyan Revolution

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Abstract
Chomsky's criticism of Bloomfieldian structuralism's conception of linguistic reality applies equally to his own conception of linguistic reality. There are too many sentences in a natural language for them to have either concrete acoustic reality or concrete psychological or neural reality. Sentences have to be types, which, by Peirce's generally accepted definition, means that they are abstract objects.Given that sentences are abstract objects, Chomsky's generativism as well as his psychologism have to be given up. Langendoen and Postal's argument inThe Vastness of Natural Languagesto show that there are more than denumerably many sentences is flawed. But, with the view that sentences are abstract objects, the flaws can be corrected. Once psychologism and generativism are abandoned, the revolution against Bloomfieldian structuralism can be brought to completion and linguistics can be put on a sound philosophical basis.

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