ABSTRACT
In many recent publications Chomsky has speculated that advances in the past decade have made it reasonable to raise the question about whether language might be in some sense ‘perfect’. Here is a typical passage to that effect:
[Is] it possible that the system of language itself has a kind of optimal design, so, is language perfect? Back in the early 1980s that was the way I started every course—”Let's ask: could language be perfect?”—and then I went on the rest of the semester trying to address the question, but it never worked, the system always became very complicated. What happened in the early 1990s is that somehow it began to work; enough was understood, something had happened, it was possible to ask the question in the first session of a course: could language be perfect? and then get some results which indicated it doesn't sound as crazy as you might think. (Chomsky 2002: 96–79)
