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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Chomskyans must be credited with holding that the primary linguistic data are impoverished quite generally.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Chomsky's own methodological writings distinguish between UG as a formal object of study and the empirical claim that all of UG requires innate specification.
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    • 2.The poverty of the stimulus argument is a local, case-by-case abductive inference, not a global claim that all grammatical knowledge is underdetermined by input.
      ?

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    • 3.Crediting Chomskyans with a 'general impoverishment' thesis conflates the logical structure of individual learnability arguments with a sweeping nativist doctrine they need not endorse.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Pullum and Scholz (2002) demonstrated that the specific stimulus data children receive is richer than Chomskyan poverty arguments typically assume, undermining the empirical basis for generalizing impoverishment.
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    • 2.If paradigm cases like structure-dependent interrogatives are shown to be learnable from available input, the inductive inference to global impoverishment lacks its evidential foundation.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Chomskyans defend the view that all of Universal Grammar (UG) is inborn.
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    • 2.If the innateness of UG as a whole is to be supported by poverty of the stimulus considerations, then the specific cases nativists discuss (polar interrogatives, complex auxiliaries, etc.) must be only the tip of a larger unlearnable iceberg.
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