Barbara C. Scholz

Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments

Abstract This article examines a type of argument for linguistic nativism that takes the following form: (i) a fact about some natural language is exhibited that allegedly could not be learned from experience without access to a certain kind of (positive) data; (ii) it is claimed that data of the type in question are not found in normal linguistic experience; hence (iii) it is concluded that people cannot be learning the language from mere exposure to language use. We analyze the components of this sort of argument carefully, and examine four exemplars, none of which hold up. We conclude that linguists have some additional work to do if they wish to sustain their claims about having provided support for linguistic nativism, and we offer some reasons for thinking that the relevant kind of future work on this issue is likely to further undermine the linguistic nativist position.

Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism

Abstract This article is a reply to the foregoing responses to our “Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments” (Pullum and Scholz, this special volume, here-after EASPA). We first address certain philosophical themes that cut across all six responses. We correct the impression held by Lasnik and Uriagereka (L&U) and Crain and Pietroski (C&P) that EASPA owes the reader an alternative theory of language acquisition; we distinguish linguistic nativism from several alternatives, only one of them being anti-nativism as espoused by Sampson; we examine the claim of Thomas that there is an identifiable concept ‘poverty of the stimulus’ in the linguistics literature; we point out that Fodor and Crowther (F&C) appear to misunderstand certain mathematical learnability results; and we address a purported argument for nativism (quite distinct from the stimulus poverty argument we considered in EASPA) that is advanced independently by several respondents: F&C, L&U, and Legate and Yang (L&Y) – an argument based on the underdetermination of theory by evidence.

Recursion and the infinitude claim

(2) This property of discrete infinity characterizes EVERY human language; none consists of a finite set of sentences. The unchanged central goal of linguistic theory over the last fifty years has been and remains to give a precise, formal characterization of this property and then to explain how humans develop (or grow) and use discretely infinite linguistic systems. (Epstein and Hornstein 2005: 4)

For universals (but not finite-state learning) visit the zoo

Evans & Levinsons (EL their point is that what makes human languages really interesting for cognitive science is their diversity, not their uniformity. Boas would have endorsed this view, but it seems fresh and novel in the current context. You want species-wide universal grammar? Visit the zoo. Study puttynose monkeys (Arnold & Zuberbuhler 2006), or your cat. What human beings bring to animal communication is not rigid universals but a flexible ability to employ any of a gigantic range of strikingly varied systems. That seems to be what E&L are saying.

Tracking the origins of transformational generative grammar

Tracking the main influences of 19thand 20th-century mathematics, logic and philosophy on pre-1958 American linguistics and especially on early Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) is an ambitious crossdisciplinary endeavour. Ideally it would call for expertise in the methods of intellectual historiography, the history and content of 20th-century American linguistics, the history and philosophy of science (including logic and mathematics), the tools and results of mathematical logic, and the theory of computable functions. Scholars fully versed in all of these fields are rare indeed. If Marcus Tomalin makes some mistakes in his book (henceforth LFS), that should not be surprising. What is surprising is how much progress he makes in furthering intellectually serious work on the history of modern linguistics, and how wide his reading in the relevant technical literature has been. LFS locates the intellectual roots of TGG in the methods developed by 19thand 20th-century mathematics and logic for exhibiting the conceptual structure of theories and constructing rigorous proofs of theorems. Tomalin discusses the methods developed by Augustin-Louis Cauchy for the rigorisation of the calculus in the 1820s; Whitehead & Russells use of the axiomatic method in Principia Mathematica (1910-1913); the Hilbert program (in the 1920s) to prove all of mathematics consistent; Bloomfields early axiomatisation of a general linguistic theory (1926); Carnaps logical empiricist proposals for the logical reconstruction of science on an experiential basis in the 1920s and 1930s; and Goodmans (1951) adaptation and revision of Carnap (1928). Earlier histories of TGG have not investigated

Gold's theorems and the logical problem of language acquisition

Evaluating Brian MacWhinneys multiple ‘solutions’ to the logical problem of language acquisition requires delineating exactly what the alleged problem is. He takes it to stem from the theorems of Gold (1967), the most celebrated of which is G1.