3 ms·
Seems very close to his argument about the innateness of language structures. I can rephrase your question replacing moral* with language: > Chomsky seems to b
by throw310822 3y ago
Seems very close to his argument about the innateness of language structures. I can rephrase your question replacing moral* with language:
> Chomsky seems to be saying that since we learn the prevalent language of our culture through sparse data there must be an underlying universal language structure. But how does that allow for the fact that different languages do have different grammars and that those do change over time?
- msla 3y agoWhich, again, is a poor argument in that Chomsky never demonstrates his central conceit: Is there a poverty of the stimulus? Here's a review of a book that makes the case that children need, and use, plenty of stimulus to learn new linguistic constructions: https://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/so-much-for-chomsky/ https://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/so-much-for-chomsky... > It’s been noticed that children rarely learn a new pattern that’s demonstrated in front of them, which has been taken as meaning that they don’t imitate adult speech. But now we see that they don’t do it because a single instance isn’t enough data for them. They don’t venture to use a new construction till they’ve heard it many times and know how to use it. > A nice confirmation of this: children learning inflectional languages don’t learn the six person/number combinations at the same rate. They first master the ones with the highest frequency in adult speech– e.g. 1st person singular, rather than 3rd person plural. Again, they’re learning by imitation, and it takes a huge amount of repetition for them to learn something. They also seem to learn each verb paradigm separately– it takes a long time before they start generalizing.