Explanatory adequacy is not enough: Response to commentators on ‘Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn’t help’

Abstract

In this response to commentators on our target article ‘Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn’t help’, we argue that the fatal flaw in most UG-based approaches to acquisition is their focus on describing the adult end-state in terms of a particular linguistic formalism. As a consequence, such accounts typically neglect to link acquisition to the language that the learner actually hears, instead assuming that she is able, by means usually unspecified, to perceive her input in terms of high-level theoretical abstractions.

Subtle Implicit Language Facts Emerge from the Functions of Constructions

“…Today, however, armed with these tools, we are able to avoid the assumption that all languages must be “underlyingly” the same in key respects or learned via some sort of tailor-made “Language Acquisition Device” (Chomsky, 1965 ). In fact, if Universal Grammar consists only of recursion via “merge,” as Chomsky has proposed (Hauser et al, 2002 ), it is unclear how it could even begin to address the purported poverty of the input issue in any case (Ambridge et al, 2015 ).…”

Partial productivity of linguistic constructions: Dynamic categorization and statistical preemption

“…That the words used ‘fit’ the constraints on the construction is required, as explained in Section 2 (see also Ambridge, Pine, Rowland, Jones, & Clark, 2009; Coppock, 2008; Goldberg, 1995; Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, & Goldberg, 1991; Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, Goldberg, & Wilson, 1989; Pinker, 1989), but it is not sufficient to insure acceptability, as illustrated in the examples in Table 3. Positing underlying or invisible features does not address the learning issue, since doing so would beg the question of how it is that learners know to assign the relevant diacritics to some lexical items and not others (Ambridge, Pine, & Lieven, 2015; Goldberg, 2011b; Pinker, 1989, section 5.2).…”