Actually, that was one of the examples I had in mind. I was under the impression that the people interested in languages and sound had left linguistics in favor of phonetics, and as a result there was little interest in the interaction between the two.
My difficulty with the Chomskian method, as opposed to my ignorance about linguistics, is actually based on the "formalisms to represent syntax", since application of application of formalisms to natural language seems to be to be problematic. To quote the Wikipedia page you mentioned,
"Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors (e.g., starting a sentence and then abandoning it midway through). He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences). Consequently, the linguist can study an idealised version of language, greatly simplifying linguistic analysis...."
At the time, my impression from more neurological reading was that the errors were rather more interesting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia).
Phonetics is most assuredly part of linguistics, unless you redefine linguistics just to mean "syntax" (No linguistics department i'm aware of makes such a distinction).
And yep, there's a whole sub-discipline of psycholinguistics which definitely learns from things like speech pathologies.
Actually, that was one of the examples I had in mind. I was under the impression that the people interested in languages and sound had left linguistics in favor of phonetics, and as a result there was little interest in the interaction between the two.
My difficulty with the Chomskian method, as opposed to my ignorance about linguistics, is actually based on the "formalisms to represent syntax", since application of application of formalisms to natural language seems to be to be problematic. To quote the Wikipedia page you mentioned,
"Chomsky noted the obvious fact that people, when speaking in the real world, often make linguistic errors (e.g., starting a sentence and then abandoning it midway through). He argued that these errors in linguistic performance were irrelevant to the study of linguistic competence (the knowledge that allows people to construct and understand grammatical sentences). Consequently, the linguist can study an idealised version of language, greatly simplifying linguistic analysis...."
At the time, my impression from more neurological reading was that the errors were rather more interesting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia).