discreteinfinit

You were almost coherent until you get to your assumptions about 'what people would have me believe' about linguistic universals. There are many universals that can be explained by generative grammar. There are numerous examples. 'tradeoffs between different needs' is not an actual argument. It is ridiculous that you are replacing 50 years of work with something so unscientific and vague.

I think you know damn well that there are patterns in the mind. They are posited for many things. Generative Linguists want to determine which of those patterns can account for certain linguistic phenomenon.

Physicists and Mathematicians study idealistic events, matter and object in idealistic spaces and conditions all the time. They don't study unicorns.

You cannot account for the fact that humans can instantly parse novel sentences using 'complex and messy social conventions'.

I cant tell you have no idea what Generative Linguists do and have never really read any of the literature. You (like a lot of people here) are just repeating the predictable things people say when Chomsky comes up that they probably overheard once.

Theoretical Linguistics in the Generative tradition is entirely based on empirical data. If a theoretical linguist proposed a theory without any empirical data to support it, they would (and do) get laughed at. The poverty of the stimulus argument (which can be traced back to Plato) has plenty of evidence supporting it. Yes there is negative evidence provided to children in some cultures. In North American elementary schools and often at home, children are told when they are saying something that is considered 'wrong'. There are many cultures, families and situations where this does not happen at all and children will learn their native language just by being exposed to people in their community using language. In that case the child is only exposed to positive evidence. What is crucial here is the fact that children CAN learn a language with only positive evidence. They just listen. In addition, the similarities between the languages of the world far outweigh the differences. There is no way to account for this fact without positing some innate knowledge of language.

Also, read up on the distinction between competence and performance. I noticed you mentioned 'language use'. Yes, it is a mistake to base a theory on language use. We are talking about an ideal speaker-hearer situation. Language in a vacuum. Sound familiar?

I mean, if you happen to have some data that Stratificational Grammar can explain better than Generative Grammar I would love to see it. There are a bunch of theories directly influenced by Chomsky which offer alternatives to generative grammar. I've yet to see someone show that one is superior. In many ways, they are all extensionally equivalent.

Your Dad really likes assumptions and not providing arguments but Ill look into some of the names Ive never heard of. Thanks !

Chomsky and people who study in the generative tradition have a lot to say about language as a biological organ (which obviously evolved from the language organs Chimps possess). In fact, Chimps have very similar systems to us. They can perceive voiced onset time (VOT) just as we do and they can reason about semantic issues. They can also utter and understand sound-meaning pairs however, they have nothing like our syntax for making novel and complex utterances out of the simple ones.

Could you link some of those 'baby studies' you are referring to ?

Thing is, Chomsky is (at least partly) responsible for the so-called Cognitive Revolution. Look up B.F Skinner and notice what happened to his career after Chomsky reviewed one of his papers. Skinner's brand of behaviorism was surely something we didn't need around anymore. He also changed the way everyone thinks about language. Before Chomsky, there really was no real theory of syntax that was even close to being scientific and formal.

Although probabilistic machine learning methods replaced the Chomskyan brand of formal theoretic methods in NLP, a lot is owed to is work. Obviously there is the Chomsky Hierarchy but even things like the Penn Treebank POS tags are taken straight out of work in the Generative tradition from circa 1970 (not sure why no one has tried the updated and more accurate tags currently being used in theoretical linguistics). Anyways I could go on and on but Im wondering what your Dad has to say about this ?

P.S There is an ongoing joke in the field of Linguistics about people who either think they understand Chomsky or just straight up don't understand him. Its difficult stuff.