UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of thisfaculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.

It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.

Like most technology, the internet has mixed effects. It's a neutral instrument.

Rush Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you - they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.

I did not say that language as a completed system emerged in an individual in an instant. But I cannot think of a coherent alternative to the idea that mutations take place in individuals, not communities, so that whatever rewiring of the brain yielded the apparently unique properties of language, specifically recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions, would therefore have taken place in an individual, and only later been used among individuals who had inherited this capacity.

The number of illegal firings tripled during the [Ronald] Reagan years. It was at that time that you started getting these companies that specialized in how to destroy unions.

The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.