very good take here, and it gets to the heart of the issue: Chomsky comes out of the analytic tradition where the goal is to rigorously explain and define everything that can't quite be pinned down by mathematical symbolization. French intellectual traditions owe way more to existentialism and phenomenology, where the goal is rather to understand experiences in new, historically appropriate ways. the latter partakes, even where Foucault, for instance, is apparently undertaking a historical analysis, far more of poetic language, because the thinking is "we here in history are disclosing the historically unthought that everyone before us couldn't see"