Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
I nearly failed out of grad school, defending Chomsky's theory of syntax. Half a decade later, I'm done pretending it was worth it.
Chomskyan generative grammar — X-bar theory, Government and Binding, the Minimalist Program — was taught to me at the University of Pennsylvania as the only legitimate science of language. It was the gatekeeper, the screener, the thing students were washed out of linguistics PhD programs over. As I've come to discover, decades of work in dependency grammar and construction grammar — frameworks I was told didn't exist, didn't matter, or had been "subsumed" — were doing better empirical work the whole time.
In this video:
▸ What Chomsky actually got right (the cognitive revolution, generative grammar as discrete infinity, the takedown of Skinner's Verbal Behavior)
▸ Where transformational grammar, deep structure, movement, empty categories, and Universal Grammar go wrong
▸ The "poverty of the stimulus" argument and why Pullum & Scholz's critique matters
▸ How construction grammar (Adele Goldberg) handles the active/passive, the dative alternation, "the more the merrier," and coercion — without movement
▸ How dependency grammar (Lucien Tesnière) handles headedness, raising vs. control, and cross-linguistic data — without phrase structure trees
▸ Why long-distance reflexives in Mandarin, Icelandic, and Japanese broke Binding Theory
▸ Why Minimalism's proliferation of functional projections (TP, vP, FocP, ForceP) looks an awful lot like Ptolemaic epicycles
▸ Usage-based linguistics (Tomasello, Bybee), psycholinguistics (Levelt, Ferreira), and what kids actually do when they learn language
CHAPTERS:
0:00 The lie I was taught
0:26 Grad school, gatekeeping, and the C that nearly ended me
4:09 The Epstein files (no, really)
4:55 What Chomsky got right
7:28 Phrases, heads, and the problem with movement
12:00 Poverty of the stimulus and innateness
13:48 Epicycles, theory-internal problems, and unfalsifiability
18:50 Binding Theory and the cross-linguistic data
19:39 Dependency grammar and construction grammar
0:00 Walking out of the cult of Chomsky
🎓 Intro to Linguistics — the one Penn forgot to give me: languagejones.com/blueprint
📖 Descriptive Grammar of Black English project: languagejones.com/agobe
Drop your own grad school horror stories in the comments — I read them all. Subscribe for more on linguistics, the politics of academia, and what gets taught as foundational versus what actually is.
Recommended reading (amazon affiliate links):
- Syntax: A Cognitive Approach (Edward A. F. Gibson): amzn.to/4nU61xH
- Construction Grammar and it's application to English (Martin Hilpert): amzn.to/4dT8h3N
- Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure (Adele Goldberg): amzn.to/4wZvji3
#linguistics #chomsky #syntax
I nearly failed out of grad school, defending Chomsky's theory of syntax. Half a decade later, I'm done pretending it was worth it.
Chomskyan generative grammar — X-bar theory, Government and Binding, the Minimalist Program — was taught to me at the University of Pennsylvania as the only legitimate science of language. It was the gatekeeper, the screener, the thing students were washed out of linguistics PhD programs over. As I've come to discover, decades of work in dependency grammar and construction grammar — frameworks I was told didn't exist, didn't matter, or had been "subsumed" — were doing better empirical work the whole time.
In this video:
▸ What Chomsky actually got right (the cognitive revolution, generative grammar as discrete infinity, the takedown of Skinner's Verbal Behavior)
▸ Where transformational grammar, deep structure, movement, empty categories, and Universal Grammar go wrong
▸ The "poverty of the stimulus" argument and why Pullum & Scholz's critique matters
▸ How construction grammar (Adele Goldberg) handles the active/passive, the dative alternation, "the more the merrier," and coercion — without movement
▸ How dependency grammar (Lucien Tesnière) handles headedness, raising vs. control, and cross-linguistic data — without phrase structure trees
▸ Why long-distance reflexives in Mandarin, Icelandic, and Japanese broke Binding Theory
▸ Why Minimalism's proliferation of functional projections (TP, vP, FocP, ForceP) looks an awful lot like Ptolemaic epicycles
▸ Usage-based linguistics (Tomasello, Bybee), psycholinguistics (Levelt, Ferreira), and what kids actually do when they learn language
CHAPTERS:
0:00 The lie I was taught
0:26 Grad school, gatekeeping, and the C that nearly ended me
4:09 The Epstein files (no, really)
4:55 What Chomsky got right
7:28 Phrases, heads, and the problem with movement
12:00 Poverty of the stimulus and innateness
13:48 Epicycles, theory-internal problems, and unfalsifiability
18:50 Binding Theory and the cross-linguistic data
19:39 Dependency grammar and construction grammar
0:00 Walking out of the cult of Chomsky
🎓 Intro to Linguistics — the one Penn forgot to give me: languagejones.com/blueprint
📖 Descriptive Grammar of Black English project: languagejones.com/agobe
Drop your own grad school horror stories in the comments — I read them all. Subscribe for more on linguistics, the politics of academia, and what gets taught as foundational versus what actually is.
Recommended reading (amazon affiliate links):
- Syntax: A Cognitive Approach (Edward A. F. Gibson): amzn.to/4nU61xH
- Construction Grammar and it's application to English (Martin Hilpert): amzn.to/4dT8h3N
- Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure (Adele Goldberg): amzn.to/4wZvji3
#linguistics #chomsky #syntax
