The relation between mind and language: The Innateness Hypothesis and the Poverty of the Stimulus

Abstract

This article tries to show some specifically linguistic weak points in the Poverty of-the-Stimulus Argument (PSA). Besides some quantitative considerations, from a qualitative point of view it is shown that the innatist tradition underestimates analogy as a resource for children to build their own grammars from the incomplete stimuli they receive from the environment; that knowledge and consciousness of reality surrounding the speech acts are also underestimated, and in fact play a major role in allowing children to build their internal grammars; that the role of “negative information”, conceived as the fact that some structures simply (but systematically) do not occur in the stimulus, is also underestimated. It is also suggested that the high degree of convergence of all known grammars does not need to be explained by means of one grammar in the brain, but simply results from a series of constraints that are pragmatic in nature, or directly derive from the definition of a system designed for communication.

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