But look: my mom, who worked in academic publishing, could do a brilliant job editing a math manuscript for style without knowing calculus.
Btw am I understanding you right that “syntax”, to a linguist, means the truth claims language refers to, & is separate from style?
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No. That is semantics. In classical linguistics language is made up of phonology (and orthography) - sounds (and written symbols) morphology - word composition syntax - idea-unit composition (eg sentence) semantics - 'meaning' at all levels, eg word, sentence, paragraph etc.
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Why Pinker and Marcus are set off is based on the huge syntactic turn caused by Chomsky which they followed: they all believe(d) syntax was the engine of language, and Universal Grammar UG was in every head just churning out good sentences using 'localized' rules as it were.
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