You are not alone—that is the orthodox Chomskyan position. Chomsky has argued that grammar is unlearnable given the limited data available to children, and therefore there must be an innate linguistic capacity. This is the celebrated “poverty of the stimulus” argument. Like most of Chomsky’s ideas, it is armchair theorizing with little empirical support.
I would totally support a top-level post.
Given the number of replies and upvotes, that seems warranted. I’ll try to find the time.
Certainly, humans are endowed with some sort of predisposition toward language learning. The substantive issue is whether a full description of that predisposition incorporates anything that entails specific contingent facts about natural languages.
So this makes it sound like the only thing the authors are rejecting is the idea of a system with certain rigid assumptions built in—as opposed to, say, a more or less Bayesian system that has a prior which favors certain assumptions without making those assumptions indefeasible. Am I reading that right?
Yes, you’re reading that right. They address this even more explicitly at the beginning of section 2.2 on page 17, and, especially in footnotes 5 and 6.
As for the statement that humans have “some sort of predisposition toward language learning”, that is weak enough for even me to agree with it. We are social animals, with innate desires to communicate and the intelligence to do so in complex ways.
You are not alone—that is the orthodox Chomskyan position. Chomsky has argued that grammar is unlearnable given the limited data available to children, and therefore there must be an innate linguistic capacity. This is the celebrated “poverty of the stimulus” argument. Like most of Chomsky’s ideas, it is armchair theorizing with little empirical support.
Given the number of replies and upvotes, that seems warranted. I’ll try to find the time.
Reading the article:
So this makes it sound like the only thing the authors are rejecting is the idea of a system with certain rigid assumptions built in—as opposed to, say, a more or less Bayesian system that has a prior which favors certain assumptions without making those assumptions indefeasible. Am I reading that right?
Yes, you’re reading that right. They address this even more explicitly at the beginning of section 2.2 on page 17, and, especially in footnotes 5 and 6.
As for the statement that humans have “some sort of predisposition toward language learning”, that is weak enough for even me to agree with it. We are social animals, with innate desires to communicate and the intelligence to do so in complex ways.