I am not quite sure how to react to this piece of information.
Do I hope that this little titbit of information (I refuse to call it a discovery or a breakthrough or anything similar because hey, heaps of times you think you find something important and then it turns out to be totally unfounded) is true and gives the field of Language Acquisition a little shake on its foundations? Do I rejoice at the possibility that I can one day go "YEAH, SUCK ON THAT UNCLE NOAM!" because I love it when the old man is proven wrong? (He is an unstoppable force--those theories he postulates! Can't they ever be simple enough to understand? Can't they every just fade into oblivion, obscure and unimportant in the field of Linguistics, instead of causing a huge abandonment of ideas pre-Chomsky? Can't they be written in NORMAL ENGLISH, and not like they are a mad caricature of himself?)
On the other hand. Do I go all disappointed because I, as a human being, may have been stripped of the very cool Language Acquisition Device (LAD*) that Noam Chomsky claimed all people (babies/kids, at least) have? Do I shrivel up a little bit inside because I may have suffered a demotion in my set-apart-from-animals-ness? Oh God forbid, if this is true, am I a tiny bit less special? LOL.
(*Up til now it has been a widely accepted theory. But is it because of human narcissism or the plain lack of a better explanation for our capacity for language?)
I do suspect though that this will fizzle out in disappointment. It'll probably become yet another unfounded , unconclusively-proven hypothesis--because no one can faze the Chomsky. :p ...Or my spirit may merely be broken and defeated. It would be pretty cool if it panned out. Just for something different. There is hope yet.
