Gotta love a good academic controversy! The video below looks into perhaps the most intense and raging arguments in the field of linguistics, beginning with Noam Chomsky’s theories from the 1950s and 1960s suggesting that humans share a Universal Grammar (UG) that stems from the structure and functions that have evolved in the human brain. This theory is still hotly debated, and takes on even more interesting parameters in the age of artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs). As we become increasingly reliant upon these word-prediction machines, how does what we know about human language impact the way they are created and function?

David Crotty

David Crotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.

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