The aphorism "science advances one funeral at a time" generally means that scholars get conservative in their old age but still take up intellectual space.
Except in Generative #syntax, where the problem is that the 95(?) year old Chomsky (along with a few others) keeps trying to make progress, and much of the field resent him (them) for it.
@grvsmth that's not what I said. How could that possibly be what I said?
But hey, you're talking to someone who incorporates Chomsky's recent work but can't get a TT job, gets regular rejected by journals, and who used to get regularly rejected by conferences (I don't bother submitting anymore).
@thrilway So we're both on the outs with this system. We could try to figure out why and if there's any way to fix it, or we could be confrontational about it.
Ultimately, a big chunk of the dysfunction is the fault of Chomsky and his enablers, and if we can't agree on that, we're not going to agree on much else.
@grvsmth I didn't intend to be confrontational about it, so I'm sorry if I did.
And, yes, we're in the same boat more-or-less, and even though I don't agree with your partial diagnosis, I suspect we could find things we do agree on.
@thrilway I think we can both agree that there's a lot of corruption in linguistics, across subfields and theoretical orientations, mostly in the form of patronage.
Beyond that, I don't know. Please don't tell people they're petty because they demand acknowledgment and credit, for themselves or for others. It's an essential currency of academia.
@grvsmth I guess it depends on what you mean by "patronage"
My reading of your original response was that you would take Chomsky's recent work seriously if he took your work seriously which, in my mind, is petty. But that's only because I tend to think an argument can be valid even if it's author hasn't met your standard of decorum. (It's also self-defeating, but that's closer to my original point which is apparently beside the point)
Dan Milway 
Dr. Angus Andrea Grieve-Smith