Taxonomic linguistics is empiricist in its assumption that general linguistic theory consists only of a body of procedures for determining the grammar of a language from a corpus of data, the form of language being unspecified except insofar as restrictions on possible grammars are determined by this set of procedures. If we interpret taxonomic linguistics as making an empirical claim, this claim must be that the grammars that result from application of the postulated procedures to a sufficiently rich selection of data will be descriptively adequate - in other words, that the set of procedures can be regarded as constituting a hypothesis about the innate language-acquisition system.
- Chomsky (1969), a pag.52-53