At my undergrad I felt like I was expected to side with my professors in their worship of Chomsky. Also, my general experience is that Chomsky is a lightning rod for the more polemic aspects of the field, he loves to make sweeping dismissals of entire subfields, which then encourages people to take sides.
In grad school, in syntax and historical we do go through concepts by reading specific papers written by Famous People in the field, but we also deconstruct those papers. It’s not so much “you need to read Pollock to understand the cartographic approach to syntax” as “here’s a bunch of evidence Pollock found to suggest we need more fine-grained projections”. And more than one of the profs has explicitly told us that part of the reason we’re learning by reading the primary literature rather than decontextualised versions is because we need to learn how to read and analyse academic papers if we want to be able to do our own research.
I would also note that the primary difference between linguistics and modern physics is that in modern physics there’s a correct answer to teach, while in linguistics most areas haven’t yet been settled. Instead there are a lot of different theories with different areas of explanatory coverage and no unifying theory that works yet. It’s the kind of situation that fosters Blue/Green partisanship and I would expect that to persist until someone comes up with a theory that’s more obviously correct than the current offerings.
There isn’t a correct answer to teach in Modern Physics, either. (Well, there is, but just like in linguistics, it’s not agreed upon as to what it is.) You have controversy over things like what interpretation of quantum mechanics to take, or whether string theory is a load of nonsense, or whatever.
At my undergrad I felt like I was expected to side with my professors in their worship of Chomsky. Also, my general experience is that Chomsky is a lightning rod for the more polemic aspects of the field, he loves to make sweeping dismissals of entire subfields, which then encourages people to take sides.
In grad school, in syntax and historical we do go through concepts by reading specific papers written by Famous People in the field, but we also deconstruct those papers. It’s not so much “you need to read Pollock to understand the cartographic approach to syntax” as “here’s a bunch of evidence Pollock found to suggest we need more fine-grained projections”. And more than one of the profs has explicitly told us that part of the reason we’re learning by reading the primary literature rather than decontextualised versions is because we need to learn how to read and analyse academic papers if we want to be able to do our own research.
I would also note that the primary difference between linguistics and modern physics is that in modern physics there’s a correct answer to teach, while in linguistics most areas haven’t yet been settled. Instead there are a lot of different theories with different areas of explanatory coverage and no unifying theory that works yet. It’s the kind of situation that fosters Blue/Green partisanship and I would expect that to persist until someone comes up with a theory that’s more obviously correct than the current offerings.
There isn’t a correct answer to teach in Modern Physics, either. (Well, there is, but just like in linguistics, it’s not agreed upon as to what it is.) You have controversy over things like what interpretation of quantum mechanics to take, or whether string theory is a load of nonsense, or whatever.