Philosophy

You don't need to put project a false argument onto what I was saying.

Chomsky's basic arguments:

1: UG requires understanding the semantic roles of words and phrases to map syntactic structures onto semantic structures.

2: UG posits certain principles of grammar are universal, and that syntactic and semantic representation is required as meaning changes with structure. The result is semantic universals - basic meanings that appear across all languages.

3: Semantic bootstrapping is then invoked to explain where children using their understanding of semantic categorizes to learning syntactic structures of language.

LLM's torpedo all of this as totally unnecessary as fundamental to language acquisition, because they offer at least one example where none of the above need to be invoked. LLM's have no innate understanding of language; its just pattern recognition and association. In UG semantics is intrinsically linked to syntactic structure. In this way, semantics are learned indirectly through exposure, rather than through an innate framework. LLM's show that a UG and all of its complexity is totally unnecessary in at least one case of demonstrated language acquisition. That's huge. Its beyond huge. It gives us a testable, falsifiable path forwards that UG didn't.

The mainstream opinion in linguistics is that LLM’s are mostly irrelevant.

Largely, because Chomsky. To invoke Planck's principle: Science advances one funeral at a time. Linguistics will finally be able to evolve past the rut its been in, and we now have real technical tools to do the kind of testable, reproducible, quantitative analysis at scale. We're going to see more change in what we understand about language over the next five years than we've learned in the previous fifty. We didn't have anything other than baby humans prior to now to study the properties of language acquisition. Language acquisition in humans is now a subset of the domain because we can actually talk about and study language acquisition outside of the context of humans. In a few more years, linguistics won't look at-all like it did 4 years ago. If departments don't adapt to this new paradigm, they'll become like all those now laughable geography departments that didn't adapt to the satellite revolution of the 1970s. Funny little backwaters of outdated modes of thinking the world has passed by. LLM's for the study of language acquisition is like the invention of the microscope, and Chomsky completely missed the boat because it wasn't his boat.