My view of it, in retrospect, is that in the intervening fifty years – we're now fifty years from the publication of that book – it doesn't seem to have panned out. One cannot criticise it for that. To me, in some ways, this book is like Freud's first book on the unconscious. I don't buy the ego, the id, and the superego any more, and I don't buy the Oedipus complex, but I think that Freud was the most marvellous writer on the unconscious that ever lived. That fact that he was wrong is almost irrelevant because he got people thinking about things they never thought about before. To me, Chomsky is the same; I think he's wrong on a lot of this stuff but nobody thought about language in this way before he came along.
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/daniel-everett-linguistics/
_- Steve
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