What this discussion is missing is Chomsky's distinction between I-language and E-language. I (individual/internal/intensional) language is the knowledge of an individual native speaker. E-language represents the body of external knowledge about language such as corpus data and mass statistical models.
Study of I-language looks at idealised individual speaker's internal language capacity, which can generate an infinite array of structured expressions from finite pieces. From the internalist perspective, E-language is a dead end because it represents only part of the knowledge of an individual, that which happens to be externalised. Many of the most interesting and revealing linguistic are barely reflected in corpora but can be elicited in experiments with individual speakers.
"E-language" approaches, like statistical models of language, do lead to practical and useful results. But using E-language approaches to seriously study the human capacity for language is about as useful as doing physics experiments in GTA.
Study of I-language looks at idealised individual speaker's internal language capacity, which can generate an infinite array of structured expressions from finite pieces. From the internalist perspective, E-language is a dead end because it represents only part of the knowledge of an individual, that which happens to be externalised. Many of the most interesting and revealing linguistic are barely reflected in corpora but can be elicited in experiments with individual speakers.
"E-language" approaches, like statistical models of language, do lead to practical and useful results. But using E-language approaches to seriously study the human capacity for language is about as useful as doing physics experiments in GTA.