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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: What's innate?
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Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 18:33:17 GMT
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In article <3kl8vo$k04@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu>,
Edward Faith  <jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>jrstern@aol.com (JRStern) wrote:
>> There seems to be an assumption here that understanding a sentence is a
>> simple task, and that grammars are complicated.  I guess my position is
>> just the opposite.
>
>Then ally yourself with the critics of Chomsky, since the very
>foundation of his theory that there must be an innate language
>acquisition device which provides a menu of possible grammars, is
>that the grammar of a language is far too complicated for a child to
>learn without such an innate l.a.d.

Not at all.  The argument is not based on the supposed complexity of the
grammar, but on the absence of certain classes of errors that might be
expected if the child had no advance information about the form of the 
grammar. 
