Applied Linguistics) and University of Boston Child Language Development
conferences, as a cursory count of papers on the basis of abstracts shows.
Suzanne Flynn, one of the early adapters of GG to SLA, is“disappointed
with the way things have turned out”. She also refers to the factions that
developed within the GG community and the competition and rivalry that
have harmed the enterprise. There is“dancing on Chomsky’s grave”and
Chomsky-bashing rather than an evaluation of what parts of the theory are
relevant for AL. She regrets the–in her view unhealthy–competition in the
GG community,“your religion–my religion,”rather than data driven. She
decided to move to research on dementia and L3 rather than core GG/SLA.
For Andrea Tyler the decline of GG went further than the abandoning of
a paradigm:“The current big gap between linguistics generally and language
teaching was partly caused by the fact that GG could not explain many
aspects of SLA and many people gave up linguistics due to the GG failure.”
Rod Ellis mentions that in the forthcoming edition of hisUnderstanding SLA
there will no longer be a separate chapter on GG-based approaches to SLA,
but only some paragraphs in the chapter on linguistic approaches.
Jim Lantolf regrets that there is no real discussion between camps or
openness for each other’s arguments:
We both can’t be right. But who is willing to invest the time to really
understand the other theory. How to reach a synthesis? I do follow
developments in UG, but the UG people don’t have time, there are
isolated camps with different cultures. Is there progress if we only
develop in our own community or way of thinking?While for the language as a social phenomenon community the GG
research and the psycholinguistic community are seen as one group with the
overall label “cognitive”, there have been serious controversies between
these two communities. In my view, it is no coincidence that in Levelt’s
(1989) ground-breaking book on language production there is only one
reference to Chomsky, and that is not N. but C. Chomsky. In the psycho-
linguistic community, the idea of innateness and a Language Acquisition
Device (LAD) were seen as problematic, and the leading institute in the
world, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen was
ostensibly anti-GG. This is also reflected in Levelt’s early criticism of the GG
model in his 1975 workWhat Happened to LAD?
There is also a sociological component in the debate about the position of
GG at universities. Starting from the 1960s, GG was seen as the new way to
go and many linguistics departments turned Chomskian, which led to se-
rious conflicts with linguists of other persuasions who felt sidetracked. Now
that generation of GG linguists is retiring and there is a tendency in many
universities not to replace them with younger scholars of that school, but
rather appoint UB oriented linguists. There is almost a euphoria that the grip
of the nativists on what constitutes linguistics is gone and that other approaches
Main trends I 59