Subject: 3 . 417 citations

i can't resist putting in my tuppence worth on chomsky 's citation record . here are my very informal observations of how he is treated by non ( theoretical ) linguists . ( 1 ) mathematical theory of formal languages . chomsky still gets cited almost automatically for his pioneering work on hierarchies of languages . ( 2 ) philosophy of language . c gets cited a lot for his nativist claims : his arguments are usually rejected . fodor 's much more radical nativism gets even more attention and even more rejection . c also gets cited a lot in discussions of wittgenstein , usually as an example of the sort of narrow formalist , rule-based view a language that wittgenstein consistently argued against . ( 3 ) psychology . c has frequently claimed that what he is doing is scientific psychology , but this has failed to impress psychologists . the competence / performance distinction , the autonomous language faculty assumption and the concern with ug all put c 's theoretical constructs beyond the ken of most experimental or empirical psychologists . ( 4 ) biology . it would interesting to know if * any * evolutionary biologists have taken up c 's views or tried to explain how they could be investigated . again , his views often get mentioned in general introductions . . . but only to be rejected . ( 5 ) cognitive science . as gardner showed in " the mind 's new science " , c was a source of inspiration . consequently he is cited very frequently in cognitive science literature . again , however , it is his formal , comptuational approach - not his genuinely linguistic work - that are referred to . so , although c is viewed as a founder of cognitive science , his current theory of grammar has had no real impact on the field . in general , it seems that most people outside of linguistics know of chomsky as he appears in " aspects " and in the non-technical parts of " knowledge of language " . it 's surely a safe bet that almost no non-linguist followed him into " government and binding " . - philip swann
