Generative grammar. posted by Richard Seymour

Oliver Kamm move over - I've just discovered that Noam Chomsky is a plagiarist! I quote from the late Mr Thomas Hobbes work Leviathan:

The first author of speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his sight; for the Scripture goeth no further in this matter. But this was sufficient to direct him to add more names, as the experience and use of the creatures should give him occasion; and to join them in such manner by degrees, as to make himself understood; and so by succession of time, so much language might be gotten, as he had found use for; though not so copious, as an orator or philosopher has need of. For I do not find anything in the Scripture, out of which, directly or by consequence can be gathered, that Adam was taught the names of all figures, numbers, measures, colours, sounds, fancies, relations; much less the names of words and speech, as general, special, affirmative, negative, interrogative, optative, infinitive, all which are useful; and least of all, of entity, intentionality, quiddity, and other insignificant words of the School.

As a Militant Liberal, I am disgusted by Chomsky's reactionary obscurantism. My fellow left-winger Stephen Pollard recently noted that Chomksy had ripped Hobbes' conclusions from their mechanist-monarchist background in order to support his anarcho-syndicalist precepts. Hobbes' sensible conclusions about the necessity of strong government, particularly in order to combat the disruptive effects of terror on the market, are belittled and disfigured by Noam Chomsky's pathetic diminutions and depredations. Chomsky imagines that an essentialist view of human nature which sees it as generative and creative is somehow compatible with 'workers control of industry'. He once again proves the dictum, which I passed on to my uncle Martin Bell, that...

Sorry, for a second I turned into Oliver Kampf .