Because if you look at the progress of (UG) syntactic theory over the past 50 years, at every threshhold of every major new development, there’s Chomsky.

Because, unlike most academics, he hasn’t been content to spend his entire career trying to prove himself right regardless of the evidence. Deep structure not such a viable concept after all? Get rid of it. X’ theory not really all it’s cracked up to be? Out it goes. That’s pretty brave when these are concepts which made your name and on which you staked a good part of your reputation.

Because the idea that children learn to speak a language through imitation now seems, to any one who sits and gives it a second thought, utterly ludicrous. Reading about Chomsky’s black box, the overwhelming emotion is a strong desire to rehash Huxley’s famous response to Darwin : how foolish never to have thought of that before. It’s that eye-opening, that much of a paradigm shift that I honestly would not hesitate to compare the two men’s work.

Because he is intelligent enough to realise that in the 50 years that modern syntactic theory has been going, he cannot possibly hope to have seen or written anything that later centuries will deem as anything other than quaintly antiquated. Modern linguistics is at a stage comparable to physics before Gallileo, though the exact wording escapes me.

Because I feel honoured beyond belief to have studied under people who studied under him, and his impact is such that if I do go back into academia, I’m fairly sure that in 10 years’ time my students will be telling people that they studied under someone who studied under someone who studied under Chomsky.

Because when I look at a sentence like that above, and realise the productivity of language and the fact that I understand it nonetheless and am thrilled to the very core of my being because of this, I am aware that it is through a Chomskian filter that I perceive my language; and although all filters necessarily provide incomplete information, his is wider and more far reaching than most and he came to it through filters so small and restrictive he was practically blind.