Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf]

At my university no one in the linguistics department actually subscribed to UG or any derivatives thereof but in the English department they did. I've observed sort of the same divide in countries. In English speaking counties UG seems to be the prevailing theory while it's much less so in non-English speaking countries.

Unfortunately people are extremely religious about their preferred theory of grammar, and it's hard to have a useful discussion about it when people are unable to remove themselves from the subject and discuss it objectively.

1) "[...] greater awareness of the diversity of human languages, and especially the discovery by Daniel Everett of a Brazilian indigenous language, Pirahã, that apparently has no subordinate clauses"

That's the one and only evidence the author shows for this point. No examples on how the language works or how it stands in contrast to Universal Grammar, and no other mention of any other language that might be contradicting UG as well (even though the author implies that there are other languages that stand in contradiction to UG). Later on though the author says "It is not even undisputed that Pirahã lacks subordinate clauses" so the one and only evidence is still a maybe.

2)"The second is advances in cognitive psychology. [...] Nowadays we know that the human mind has complex, powerful, abstract capabilities in many areas, not just language, and new possibilities are opening up for explaining language from general mechanisms of thinking and learning."

This is not an argument and no evidence has been shown for this point.

3)"The third factor is the increasing use of data-driven methods in computational linguistics [...] In a data-driven approach, structure arises because sentences obviously consist of parts that can be recognized before recognizing the whole. [...] This predicts that the grammar of uncommon words will be simple and regular, but common words will have more quirks because we have more examples from which to learn them. That is exactly what we observe in language, and it’s a source of great clutter in a grammar constructed on Chomskyan principles."

As far as I know, the fact that sentences have parts that can be individually recognized before recognizing the whole, is not contradicting UG at all. To the best of my knowledge, UG only says that there is a structure, not how the structure comes about. So the only point left is the fact that common words have more varied usage and are harder to pin down as a particular specific element of the structure. I don't see how that relates to UG quite frankly. Maybe someone can enlighten me on this.

I have no particular love for UG, I just know of it on a very general sense, but if I was a teacher and a student gave me this article as a report, I would've failed him just for the lack of evidence.

That's hardly unique to HN. Following Chomsky, I'd argue that it's actually a universal behavior, which merely finds (slight) variation in expression according to the medium at hand. It even has a Latin name - argumentum ad logicam - and it's closely related to cherry picking except that it's applied to parts of the argument instead of to data. In fact, I just did it to you when I picked on the inessential "about HN" part of your sentence (which reads fine without it), and if you find that annoying then perhaps you should consider that you also did it when you jumped into a response about innuendo without addressing the more substantive discussion that had already occurred.