COMMENTS

Abstract

Once again, we are stimulated by a set of excellent papers on problems in Korean' linguistics. These studies exemplify both the virtues and the faults of recent linguistic' theory. What makes the Chomskyan- and ~post-Chomskyan- approach to the study of language so particularly seductive to bright young minds is that it encourages highly imaginative speculation, and the results are fun even when they turn out to be wrong. The weakness of the approach is its failure to provide criteria by which the results of the speculation can either be validated or be disconfirmed. The locus of linguistic reality for the ·generative grammarian is a perversely inaccessible realm of logical rules that probably exists only in the eye of the philosopher.