Why do linguists just assume mental representations for language when neuro folk think that's whack? OK, in turn:
1. Linguists agree on *nothing* & often seem to (or act like they) really hate each other
2. Language is WILDLY complicated & variation is profound
... 1/

3. DESPITE all this, most/all descriptive frameworks *default* to type/token symbolic combinatorial notations etc & the decades-long bitterly ad-hominem shitshow that passes for central debate in ling hinges on issues incomprehensible to outsiders
4. How ELSE would this work?
2/

OK:
1. Hateful Linguists: this is getting much better but was until recently dominated by an international circus of wrathful man-babies in an endless game of walrussy macholectualism. This wasn't great for field-wide consensus or, um, the field. See ⬇️ 2/

2. Language is Very Confusing: it is impossible to understate just how much is going on in any structural description of any *one* language, all the levels of analysis to account for and all the baffling & entirely heterogeneous *types* of structural organisation involved... 3/

Nobody agrees on how/if to do any of this, of course, where/if to draw borders between subdomains, whether it's instrumentalist or Platonic gold-dust & that's just the start: another huge blood-soaked ordeal is accounting for cross-linguistic variation 4/
plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/

To 100% misrepresent everything: Camp Noam observe that kittens/rocks don't learn language but kids do, so all languages are the same and even Martians would agree with this. Also lots of other stuff, plus some terrible biology & the word 'recursion' which never gets defined 5/

Camp Everyone Else strongly disagrees with Camp Noam & notional Martian for LOTS of reasons, a big one being that languages are actually amazingly varied & diverse. The terms of this debate are never settled & everyone talks past each other until the heat death of the universe 6/

It's all really interesting. Everyone in cogsci & neuro & philosophy should probably know that the idea of 'a word', or the existence of verbs & nouns, or really *any* ling commonalities are huge controversies in linguistics - HEY LOOK MY PAPER NO WAY 7/
www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingty-2020-2061/html?lang=en

But folk in cogsci and neuro and phil don't care & are happy to assume it's all *more or less* the same as their own (probably Indo-European) language, i.e. wordy bits, some word-ordery stuff, blah. Philosophers especially just want to talk some MORE about CONTENT YAY
8/

3) Pinheads/Angels: *shockingly*, most of the linguistic hatefests actually revolve around vaguely defined philosophical nightmares re innateness or the demarcation problem or how to best ignore pragmatics. Luckily nobody has any formal training in any of this :)
9/

4) SAY NO TO PDEs: NOBODY has ever thought that what (this sort of canonical/theoretical) linguistic theory *really* needs is some DIFFERENTIAL EQUATION action. I think we all feel pretty good about this. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, WHY?
10/

Look at the structural description here of a short English phrase again - how on *earth* would you jam *this* stuff into some kind of Homeostatic Steam-Regulated Gibsonian Direct-Perception Fly-Ball framework? There are no affordances for affordance theory here! Just WHY?
11/

A *ton* of *other* aspects of lang- interaction/use, social cog, perception, physiology & motor control in production/reception, cross- modalities etc, all WOULD seriously benefit from eco-approaches. But this structural stuff? How even START without mental representations?

/fin