Department of EECS and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, 32D-728, 77 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Cogn Sci. 2011 Sep-Oct;35(7):1207-42. doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01189.x. Epub 2011 Aug 8.
A central goal of modern generative grammar has been to discover invariant properties of human languages that reflect "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). Candidates for such invariances include the structure dependence of grammatical rules, and in particular, certain constraints on question formation. Various "poverty of stimulus" (POS) arguments suggest that these invariances reflect an innate human endowment, as opposed to common experience: Such experience warrants selection of the grammars acquired only if humans assume, a priori, that selectable grammars respect substantive constraints. Recently, several researchers have tried to rebut these POS arguments. In response, we illustrate why POS arguments remain an important source of support for appeal to a priori structure-dependent constraints on the grammars that humans naturally acquire.
现代生成语法的一个核心目标是发现反映“心智的内在图式，它应用于经验数据”的人类语言的不变属性，并且“可以合理地归因于生物体本身，作为其对获取知识任务的贡献”（乔姆斯基，1971）。这种不变性的候选者包括语法规则的结构依赖性，特别是对疑问句形成的某些限制。各种“刺激贫乏”（POS）论证表明，这些不变性反映了一种内在的人类天赋，而不是共同的经验：只有当人类先验地假设可选择的语法符合实质性限制，这种经验才值得选择所获得的语法。最近，几位研究人员试图反驳这些 POS 论证。作为回应，我们说明了为什么 POS 论证仍然是支持对人类自然获得的语法施加先验的、基于结构的限制的一个重要依据。
