I understand what you are saying and you are technically correct.
I still don't need Chomsky to tell me children/humans have an innate capacity for language. To me, that is an axiom.
My point about Chomsky is that he is well-respected for very basic points in his field, but then he reaches, like Kursweil, into fantasy and his credibility in linguistics is not enough to support his other arguments. For Chomsky, it is politics and history; for Kursweil, it is autonomous, intelligent, conscious AI.
I am intriqued...could you briefly state Pinker's thesis on ebonics as gramatically correct. I look at the morals, work ethics, and apparent of those who speak ebonics and behave thuggish and view it as lazy-man's English.
I do find that professors are often circumlocutous and wordy. Thankfully I am a biochemistry major!
oh, I see. yes, for whatever reason we all seem to have our specialty, which we are very, very good at and then everything else is hit or miss.
Pinker says that so much of English, and all languages, is made excessively complicated for little reason.
When kids say "I holded the icecream cone", instead of "I held the icecream cone", who is really correct? The kids are correct, the simplist rule should apply. Language would be much easier to learn if exceptions to rules were eliminated.
In a ghetto, someone might say "I ain't got no" as opposed to "I haven't got any".
if we analyze this functionally, in linguistic terms - ain't is a widely used word that can be substituted in a vast number of circumstances where it's meaning is clear. "I ain't gonna", "Ain't that something?" - it is more efficient then attemptig to differentiate using all these different more 'proper' words like 'havn't' "I'm not", "Isn't".
In, "I haven't got any" - what does 'any' realy mean? Using a double negative, "I ain't got no", makes the sentence more clear. Pinker says that double negatives are used throughout a majority of languages quite frequently. Je ne pense pas - in French is a double negative.
So, ghetto speak is actually more efficient then the gobbly gook coming out of academic conferences. That being said, the fact that some don't take the time to learn proper english etc.. generally indicates that some of the things that you said will be the case.
I just thought the whole perspective was interesting.