What about a (really) minimalist theory of language acquisition? *.

Abstract

The Minimalist Program introduced a new concept of language and added new content to the innateness position concerning our linguistic capacity. It also redefined the metatheoretical role of the theory of acquisition within generative grammar. This article explores at length all these issues and offers a critical survey of the disconcerting situation dominating today's relationship between syntacticians and acquisitionists.

1. Introduction

The emergence and the development of the Minimalist Program (MP) provoked a change in how we judge the explanatory adequacy of the principles attributed to the human faculty of language. We no longer consider these principles good candidates for inclusion in the linguistic capacity a child makes use of in constructing a grammar from an opaque and fragmentary stimulation; rather we look at their adequacy as optimal solutions for the needs imposed by the cognitive systems that language is supposed to serve as a sort of bridge. Apparently, those who investigate language acquisition have answered to this shift by ignoring or only superficially attending to the theoretical challenges introduced by the MP. It is not the aim of this article to claim that this situation is to be explained by the displacement of matters of acquisition to a secondary position within generativism. We shall simply try to describe the state of the art in the field as well as to put forward some ideas on how to focus the study of acquisition in accordance with the minimalist conception of human language.

The article is organized as follows: Section 2 attempts to clarify the value of the classical "Poverty of Stimulus Argument" and to show that its real argumentative power is in agreement with the position in which the MP places the questions related to the acquisition of language. This very section examines the notion of "innateness" and explores a partial redefinition of it motivated by the main minimalist contentions about language. Section 3 tries to show that recent research in the field of language acquisition seems in general (and in its essence) not to observe the crucial theoretical challenges brought into linguistics by minimalism. In order to reach this goal we have done a careful examination of the most relevant articles on acquisition published during the years 2001 and 2002. Section 4 summarizes the main ideas of our article and comments on the current divide between syntactic theory and acquisition theory, an undesirable situation although utterly significant, as it illustrates the confusion into which the MP seems to have driven linguistic theorizing.

2. Innateness and Poverty of Stimulus in the Minimalist Program

The Poverty of Stimulus Argument (henceforth, PS argument), whose ultimate formulation is usually attributed to Chomsky (1980), (1) is generally accepted as the strongest foundation of the nativist position held by generative grammarians about human language. (2) The truth is that the argument has been misinterpreted by many, especially by those who think that proving its falsity is the most effective way to discredit generativism. For this reason, we will devote the following pages to clarifying the content of the argument and its weight in support to the innateness thesis. We will also dedicate some pages to rethinking and reformulating this thesis in the light of the central contentions of the MP and of some recent debates on the philosophy of biology.