Paper Musings

The way linguists talk about language acquisition, you get the picture that what's going on is just people inducing a grammar based on token sentences. The Poverty of the Stimulus argument therefore says there isn't enough information available in just the sentences a child hears to learn the grammar.

Suppose we look at language acquisition as learning a grammar and lexicon to express a semantic world. Suppose a child knows (or at least has a good idea) what a sentence means (and this can be determined without language, or built slowly with ungrammatical utterances). Therefore, a significant amount of information about the sentence's meaning, such as the number of objects involved, the sorts of events occurring, etc. is available. Thus, with innateness of basic mentalese and very rudimentary language learning (at the level of lexical binding), grammatical domain specificity may be unnecessary.