On Tuesday 18 October 2005 00:47, Santos Diana wrote:
> Dear Rob, Stefan and Mike,
>
> >What is in "The language instinct debate"? Once again does it dispute the
> >observation of a lack of generality in distributionally derived
> >representations, or only the innatist conclusions Chomsky drew from it?
>
> The way I read the book, I think it really disputes that observation: in
> fact Sampson's claim is that a Popperian model of try out new hypotheses on
> your language data is what a child does while learning his/her mother
> language, and that the Chomskyan claims of the lack (or shortage) of enough
> language data to learn from do not hold water.
Thanks Diana, but I have already read a number of refutals of Chomsky's
"poverty of stimulus" arguments, all of which I was quite willing to accept.
The arguments I think are strong are those of "loss of generality" presented
in the context of phonology. What does Geoff Sampson have to say about those?
-Rob
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