Here are my (quick) answers to the two 50th anniversary questions we were posed:

What was the broad question that you most wanted to get an answer to during your time in the program?

The broad question that most obsessed me when I was a student was (and still is): how can striking examples of robust crosslinguistic variation (especially in syntax) best be accounted for in light of the insight that we have a rich and substantive Universal Grammar? For example, can one truly fit both (say) a polysynthetic language and an English-like language into the same theory, doing full justice to both the similarities and the differences.

What is the current status of this question? Has it been answered? Did it turn out to be an ill-conceived question? If it’s a meaningful question as yet unanswered, please tell us what you think the path to an answer might be, or what obstacles make it a hard question.

The current status of this question: It is still relevant and well-formed (I believe). Progress has certainly been made on it, thanks to the many rich and insightful analyses of non-Indo-European languages, done largely by MIT graduates and their students, over the last 25 years ago. But deep questions about the proper form of the answer remain controversial. Furthermore, what remains to be done in this area is still huge, and has been hindered to some extent, both by the attrition of languages around the world, and the response given to it in many linguistic quarters, favoring “descriptions” of less-studied languages that are shallow and hold to a narrow kind of positivistic empiricism (in my view).

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