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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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Date: Tue, 7 Feb 1995 00:51:43 GMT
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In article <3h69pv$en3@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>I have seen no argument which is persuasive that we have a UG.  There
>seems to be good evidence to the contrary.  A UG should serve to
>stabilize the syntax of a language.  Yet we see that regional
>dialects can form quite readily, and these can include syntactic
>variations.

Whoa.  Why should UG serve to do any such thing?  Again, UG is not conceived
as including *every* syntactic variation, only certain things common to
all languages.  Chomsky holds that children still have to learn the
syntactic facts about their own native language.  A dialect might then
differ syntactically in various minor ways from other related dialects;
it might also differ in the "parameter settings" for elements of UG.

UG would imply only that regional dialects won't evolve violations of UG.
