Posted on 12/07/2018 8:27:25 AM PST by Borges
Dang, I thought it was an obituary too.
Gettin great mileage out of an old saw! See, Saw, Saw, See ... irony, Etcetera.
He is just another over-educated non-producer.
Yeah, he’s smart (though foolish), and has a big vocabulary. So what?
I scored 99%ile in English. A lot of big words to promulgate communistic propaganda does not favorably impress me.
Well linguistics is what he’ll be remembered for. His politics will be a sad footnote.
When he is gone he will be quickly forgotten IMO.
Unlike his fellow parasitic intellectual Howard Zinn, who inflicted enormous damage upon this country by infesting the history curriculum of every school with his rampant Marxist anti-Americanism.
Well, d***. I can still dream, can't I?
This horrible waste of biomatter is now gone to his deserved reward. But is it a safe space? I think not.
I, too, was fooled. Heck.
Syntactic Struvctures is one of the most influential books of all time. Howard Zinn will be forgotten.
Syntactic Struvctures has a limited release.
Zinn’s work has wormed its way into literally every textbook on this continent.
Indirectly though it’s hugely influential. It’s like Cybernetics. Few people actually read it but it’s omnipresent.
The essence of the problem with his work is the nominalism of "deep structure". His hypothesis is essentially the homunculus hypothesis, the little man inside the man who understands deep structure. He has sort of dropped that hypothesis but still refuses to acknowledge that grammar is part of learning and understanding language, not some innate capacity for grammar.
I studied the Chomsky theory taught by a Chomskyite (also a leftist) in graduate studies and tried to make it work. It didn't.
A friend of mine only knew Chomsky as a linguist and was really surprised when I told him Noam was some sort of communist. Apparently old Noam actually contributed something valuable as a linguist.
Only the good die young?
Non-producer is right-most of his books are written by his grad students!
It is true. I had to study him in linguistics too, and I had no idea about his politics back then either.
92 today.
He’s 93 today.
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