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Comment by jtraffic | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that when Chomsky dies, a burst of new and valuable linguistics research will arrive. I'm not saying I hope he dies soon. However, I think his current impact on the field is probably negative.

My theory derives from these sources: https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21695371-theor... (Chomsky's recent theory of how language evolved has not been accepted favorably), and

http://www.nber.org/papers/w21788 (this happens a lot)

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Chomsky has far less of a grip on the field than people outside it imagine. There are already lots of people doing research in linguistics that's fundamentally different in its approach. So I would not expect any very sudden sea change once Chomsky dies.

Note that the economist article is very badly informed. Since another poster didn't link directly to the relevant article on the 'facultyoflanguage' blog, here is a link:

http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/it-never-end...

> However, I think his current impact on the field is probably negative.

This is obvious if you look at other field "champions" such as Claude Lévi-Strauss in cultural anthropology. His admittedly invaluable contributions were followed by 50 years of stagnation. Granted I only studied it for a year but it was one of my reasons for not sticking with it.

Even if his work has had a negative impact, why would the field have to wait for him to die to progress?

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