1 Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited: Recent Challenges Reconsidered

A central goal of modern generative grammar has been to discover the invariant properties of language, principles presumably “part of the innate schematism of mind that is applied to the data of experience ” and that “might reasonably be attributed to the organism itself as its contribution to the task of the acquisition of knowledge ” (Chomsky, 1971). One such putative principle is the structure dependence of grammatical rules generally, including rules of question formation. One argument for this position, presented in Chomsky (1968), is sometimes called an ‘argument from the poverty of the stimulus ’ (POS) since the sample data for selecting a correct target hypothesis does not seem rich enough without positing a priori the principle in question. Recently, several researchers have claimed that this POS argument can be deflected without resort to this ‘innate schematism. ’ We demonstrate that all these recent arguments fail and pinpoint why these failures occur. We conclude that the POS argument and its support for a priori structure dependence stands, and that investigation of the question within standard approaches of the natural sciences yields interesting results and opens important questions for inquiry