WAS CHOMSKYS GREAT REVOLUTION IN LINGUISTICS A NEW PARADIGM?
THREE APPROACHES TO ANALYSING LANGUAGES 2000-2003 by Orchid Land Publications [updated 20030421] Whatever Noam Chomsky did, it certainly was a revolution and great advance in linguistics, after the list-mentality behaviorism that had prevailed till he came on the scene. The greatest genius of linguistic analysis of all time, Chomsky of course took over some of the basic ideas of his predecessors. But even where he failed to complete his revolution, i.e. when he took over an older idea like the virtual reality of a CHANGELESS (and therefore timeless) and invariant idiolect as the object of linguistic analysis, he got there by a very different route: His predecessors positivism and the list mentality were replaced by positivism’s opposite, rationalism, and a great systematizing mind. These revolutionary approaches were accompanied by an increasing focus on universal grammar–and the brain. In opposition to the regional and social dialectologists (mostly positivists who accepted the idiol
