[canjobear]

Thanks for pasting the whole thing. It's an interesting argument. The core empirical claim is

> If we rank the sequences of a given length in order of statistical approximation to English, we will find both grammatical and ungrammatical sequences scattered throughout the list; there appears to be no particular relation between order of approximation and grammaticalness.

It's totally not clear that this would be true with modern language models, after you control for (1) the length of the sentence and (2) the words in the sentence (as mentioned in the thing I linked above).

[0xddd]

I will have to take a look at that paper. I didn't catch your edit before replying. It would certainly be worthwhile to verify that claim (or not) using the paper's model if I find some time. In any case, I think the underlying point is that these language models serve a purpose, but will not uncover an underlying structure for you or derive something like the phrase structure grammar proposed in Syntactic Structures. I may be extrapolating a bit based on other times I've seen Chomsky discuss this, though.