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Languagelog provides tasty pudding

I was once thrilled to see a reference to myself on Instapundit:

Q: "What's the quickest way to shut Noam Chomsky up?"

A: "Ask him a linguistics question."


Now, my assertion seems to have at least some validity: although I'm not qualified to comment on Chomsky's linguistics work, it would appear that at least some of his linguistics work bears remarkable similarities to his political discourse:

Chomsky's typically confident conclusion is both extraordinarily broad -- "in any statistical model for grammaticalness, these sentences will be ruled out on identical grounds" -- and also unsupported by any argument other than assertion.

Score one for Boviosity!

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