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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Universal Grammar (UG) is innate

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.The poverty of the stimulus argument systematically underestimates the richness of input available to language learners, including statistical regularities, caregiver speech patterns, and multimodal cues.
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    • 2.Connectionist and usage-based models (Tomasello, Elman) demonstrate that abstract grammatical structure can emerge from domain-general learning mechanisms operating over sufficiently rich input.
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    • 3.If non-nativist mechanisms can generate the same linguistic competencies, innateness of UG is explanatorily redundant by Occam's razor, regardless of UG's research productivity.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Cross-linguistic typological work (Evans and Levinson, 2009) shows that purported linguistic universals are better characterized as tendencies with systematic exceptions, undermining the empirical basis for a fixed UG.
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    • 2.If the specific structural constraints UG posits vary substantially across languages and lack the exceptionless universality the theory requires, then innateness of those particular constraints is not warranted by the linguistic data.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.The innateness of UG is supported by inference to the best explanation
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    • 2.The argument from the poverty of the stimulus provides good reason to think there are strong constraints on the learning mechanism
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    • 3.UG supplies a theory of those constraints
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