Abstract
The study of generative grammar over the past thirty years represents a return, following a century or so of concern with other matters, to a fundamental question of linguistic science—namely, that which has sometimes been called “Plato’s problem” (cf. Chomsky, 1986), or the problem of “the poverty of the stimulus.” The question is this: how come people know as much as they do about their native languages when the observable evidence for this knowledge is so impoverished—when it is, in fact, in an extraordinarily large number of important and interesting cases, utterly, and for principled reasons, lacking from the observable data base, however rich this may be in grammatical utterances and illuminating context?
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© 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Hale, K. (1988). Linguistic Theory: Generative Grammar. In: Flynn, S., O’Neil, W. (eds) Linguistic Theory in Second Language Acquisition. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2733-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2733-9_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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