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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
bitch was asking for "precise" (i presume he meant "logical" language)
chomski dealt with the computing (logical) aspect of it, yes?
now please bring up dave crystal in a non name-dropping way. come on. summarize his relevance to this point maybe? do it for some future beer i might buy you as long as it's not warm or anything called "brown ale".
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Crystal's position isn't that of imputing an inherent political logic to language; he doesn't absolve it of a political position, and he doesn't himself exist in a political vacuum. He's closer to the (impossible) academic ideal of observing language from 'outside', if only because his position is less palpably charged with a political project.
In terms of his logic, he's been a critical contributor to the OED for decades; as such, he has an incredibly intimate, yet perspicuous, relationship, to the muddy world of 'how language works'. While he inevitably posits language as a social enterprise, this enterprise is organic, atomic and often fuzzily-bordered; if he is 'prescriptive', it's an open and porous prescritivism, something I just don't see in Chomsky. Over everything, he's almost exclusively an academic of linguism, whereas Chomsky, while a brilliant linguist, uses linguistics as collateral in his broader project(s).