THE UNFINISHED CHOMSKYAN REVOLUTION

Chomsky's criticism of Bloomfieldian structuralism's conception of lin guistic reality applies equally to his own conception of linguistic re ality. There are too many sentences in a natural language for them to have either concrete acoustic reality or concrete psychological or neu ral reality. Sentences have to be types, which, by Peirce's generally accepted definition, means that they are abstract objects. Given that sentences are abstract objects, Chomsky's generativism as well as his psychologism have to be given up. Langendoen and Postal's argument in The Vastness of Natural Languages to show that there are more than den umerably many sentences is flawed. But, with the view that sentences a re abstract objects, the flaws can be corrected. Once psychologism and generativism are abandoned, the revolution against Bloomfieldian stru cturalism can be brought to completion and linguistics can be put on a sound philosophical basis.