In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus (POTS) is the assertion that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity. As such, the argument strikes against empiricist accounts of language acquisition and is usually construed as being in favor of linguistic nativism.
Nativists claim...
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In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus (POTS) is the assertion that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity. As such, the argument strikes against empiricist accounts of language acquisition and is usually construed as being in favor of linguistic nativism.
Nativists claim that humans are born with a specific representational adaptation for language that both funds and limits their competence to acquire specific types of natural languages over the course of their cognitive development and linguistic maturation. The argument is now generally used to support theories and hypotheses of generative grammar. The name was coined by Noam Chomsky in his work Rules and Representations. The thesis emerged out of several of Chomsky's writings on the issue of language acquisition. The argument has long been controversial...
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