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not at all an expert in any of this, but there's a pretty entertaining article in the latest Harpers Mag all about this, penned by Tom Wolfe, personally I enjoy the musings of WS Burroughs on language, but don't find his analysis any more believable than any other dogmatic claims
"In this month’s cover story, Tom Wolfe attacks the charismatic cult of Noam Chomsky and the long reign of his theory that human beings are born with an innate ability to acquire languages. “It no longer mattered whether one agreed with Noam Chomsky’s scholarly or political opinions or not,” writes Wolfe, “for fame enveloped him like a golden armature.” For thirty years Chomsky had insisted that some empiricist would come along and prove him right. But in 2005, Daniel L. Everett published a paper that didn’t so much refute Chomsky’s conception of a language organ as dismiss it entirely. Wolfe tells the story of the man who proved Chomsky wrong, precipitating the great linguist’s fall from his “plateau on Olympus.” "
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