Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-s22k5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-14T12:01:58.342Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

In Defense of General Nativism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

William O’Grady
William O’Grady*
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In a recent reply to my review of The Language Lottery, David Lightfoot (1985) attempts to rebut the claims which I made about the viability of language learning without task-specific innate principles. The basic thrust of Lightfoot’s book is that there are innate linguistic principles which constrain the form of grammars and play a crucial role in language acquisition. I referred to this view as “special nativism” and contrasted it with “general nativism”, the thesis that genetic structuring of the mind is of a more general sort and does not include principles or notions specific to language. I suggested that special nativism is linked to a particular syntactic theory (transformational grammar) and that a theory of language learning more compatible with general nativism could well emerge from a different type of syntactic analysis. As an illustration of this, I briefly outlined two counterproposals, one pertaining to the interpretation of the indefinite pronoun one and the other to binding theory. In his reply to my review, Lightfoot misinterprets my suggestions, pointing to supposed inadequacies which would undermine the more general point I advanced.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , Spring 1986 , pp. 45 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Carden, Guy 1986 Blocked Forwards Coreference: Theoretical Implications of the Acquisition Data. In Studies in First Language Acquisition of Anaphora: Defining the Constraints. Lust, Barbara, ed. Dordrecht: Reidel. [In press.]Google Scholar
Chomsky, Carol 1969 The Acquisition of Syntax in Children From Age 5 to 10. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam 1981 Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Dowty, D. 1982 Grammatical Relations and Montague Grammar. Pp. 79–131 in The Nature of Syntactic Representation. Jacobson, Pauline and Pullum, Geoffery, eds. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
Ingram, David, and Shaw, Pat 1982 The Comprehension of Pronominal Coreference in Children. Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia. Ms.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, David 1982 The Language Lottery: Toward a Biology of Grammars. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lightfoot, David 1984 A Piagetian Alternative? Canadian Journal of Linguistics 29:131–135.Google Scholar
Lust, Barbara 1983 On the Notion ‘Principal Branching Direction’: A Parameter in Universal Grammar. In Studies in Generative Grammar and Language Acquisition. Otsu, Y. et al., eds. Tokyo: International Christian University.Google Scholar
McCawley, James 1984 Review of White, Grammatical Theory and Language Acquisition. Language 60:431–436.Google Scholar
O’Grady, William 1983a Anaphoric Relations in the Clause and the NP. Pp. 317–328 in Papers from the Nineteenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
O’Grady, William 1983b Review of Lightfoot, The Language Lottery. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 28:161–169.Google Scholar
O’Grady, William 1985 Thematic Dependency and Semantic Interpretation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 30:159–177.Google Scholar
O’Grady, William 1986 Principles of Grammar and Learning. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [In press.]Google Scholar
O’Grady, William, Suzuki-Wei, Y., and Cho, S.W. 1986 Directionality Preferences in the Interpretation of Anaphora: Data from Korean and Japanese. Journal of Child Language. [In press.]Google Scholar