[hasenj]

> Chomsky's search for universal grammar (..) has been a failure

I don't know about Chomsky, but I took a linguistics course and the universal grammar was a major part of the course. It seems you're implying there's no such thing, what makes you think so? The impression I got from the course is that the idea of "universal grammar" is universally accepted (among linguists, of course).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-bar_theory

Ironically I don't remember Chomsky's name coming up during the course at all.

[pessimizer]

Chomsky is the first name mentioned in that article.

[hasenj]

Yea, but I don't remember hearing about him in the course I took in the University.

Although to be honest I probably ignored names on purpose because there were so many of them.