Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited

Abstract

A central goal of modern generative grammar has been to discover invariant properties of human languages that reflect ''the innate schematism of mind that is applied to the data of experience'' and that ''might reasonably be attributed to the organism itself as its contribution to the task of the acquisition of knowledge '' (Chomsky, 1971). Candidates for such invariances include the structure dependence of grammatical rules, and in particular, certain constraints on question formation. Various ''poverty of stimulus'' (POS) arguments suggest that these invariances reflect an innate human endowment, as opposed to common experience: Such experience warrants selection of the grammars acquired only if humans assume, a priori, that selectable grammars respect substantive constraints. Recently, several researchers have tried to rebut these POS arguments. In response, we illustrate why POS arguments remain an important source of support for appeal to a priori structure-dependent constraints on the grammars that humans naturally acquire.

Recursive misrepresentations: A reply to Levinson (2013)

“…But all three grammars under consideration are context-free, and regular language is not mentioned at all-so it is a misinterpretation of Perfors and colleagues (2010) to suggest that they favor regular languages. In a related earlier study, three of the same authors (Perfors, Tenenbaum, & Regier 2006) did compare a regular grammar with a context-free grammar (see Berwick et al 2011 for further discussion). They found, however, that the context-free grammar is favored even when one only considers very simple child-directed English, where each utterance averages only 2.6 words, DISCUSSION NOTE 523 and no utterance contains center-embedding or remotely complex structures.…”

Internalismo e externalismo em linguística e a neurociência da linguagem

“…No primeiro caso, documentado em várias línguas, crianças produzem formas finitas de verbos que não existem na língua dos pais (como "fazi", em vez de "fiz", e "sabo", em vez de "sei", em português; e "goed", em vez de "went", em inglês). No segundo, crianças produzem orações sem qualquer marcação morfológica de tempo e concordância, como no exemplo abaixo, do holandês (apud BLOM, 2008, p.18) A linguística cognitiva teria, ainda, de dar conta do que é comumente chamado de "argumento da pobreza do estímulo" (BERWICK et al, 2011;PIATTELLI-PALMARINI, 1980;CHOMSKY, 1957) e da gênesis de línguas Mesmo não aceitando esses argumentos e mantendo uma aprendizagem da sintaxe por correlação, um pesquisador precisaria supor (para depois confirmar) uma maneira de instanciar as construções no cérebro. Ou seja, como afirma Pulvermüller (2002), precisa haver um desenvolvimento teórico para que se chegue a respostas que são, em última análise, empíricas.…”

The Place of Universal Grammar in the Study of Language and Mind: A Response to Dabrowska (2015)

“…This is why the framework looks radically different from earlier formal syntactic frameworks, especially with regards to the list of formal universals, which, as D notes, 'may comprise just the structure building operation Merge' (although certain other properties like the mechanisms for assigning certain grammatical features to constituents may also be included) (e.g. Berwick et al, 2011;Chomsky, 2012). Merge itself is simply the rule that permits new linguistic constituents to be integrated into syntactic structure (e.g., for every linguistic phrase XP there is a 'word' category X projecting it, and X may optionally attach to another linguistic phrase YP that will in turn have the same internal structure as XP, something like XP → X (YP)).…”

“…For instance, we would be able to discuss answers to questions such as whether or not postulated transformational movements and phases in syntax are really working-memory limitations (e.g. Berwick et al, 2011); if children really have a grammatical "Delay of Binding Principle B" effect or if they simply lack the working-memory and information activation or attention resources to use a sentence external referent for a personal pronoun when they could just recycle a previously encountered sentence-internal antecedent (e.g. Sekerina et al, 2004); and whether or not children have different grammatical learning strategies or if differences in their behavior are symptomatic of top-down or bottom-up processing (as discussed earlier, §3.7).…”