The poverty-of-the-stimulus argument and structure-dependency in L2 users of English*

Headnote

Abstract

Testing the principle of structure-dependency in second language acquisition means showing that L2 learners know structure-dependency in questions regardless of whether their L1s have syntactic movement. A grammaticality judgment test examined relative clauses, questions with relative clauses and questions with structure-dependency violations with 140 mixed L2 learners of English and 35 native speakers. All L2 learner groups overwhelmingly rejected the ungrammatical sentences with structure-dependency violations, only 9 individuals scoring less than 5/6 correct. While groups with L1s with movement (Finnish, Polish, Dutch) and those without (Japanese, Chinese, Arabic) differed significantly, these were variations within a high level of success. Structure-dependency is therefore active in all L2 learners, with some residual effect from the L1: L2 users know something which they have not acquired from outside their own minds.

1. Introduction

One of the compelling arguments for the innateness of Universal Grammar (UG) is 'Plato's problem', alias the poverty-of-the-stimulus argument: "How do we come to have such rich and specific knowledge, or such intricate systems of belief and understanding, when the evidence available to us is so meagre?" (Chomsky 1987: 33). People know more about language than they could have learnt from the samples of language they have encountered: where else could the knowledge have originated than inside their own minds? This resembles a modern version of the theological "argument by design" (Paley 1802): the world is so complex that it could not have come into being of its own accord and so must have a designer.

1.1. The nature of the poverty-of-the-stimulus argument

To use the poverty-of-the-stimulus argument to show the innateness of a particular aspect of syntax means going through the following stages (Cook 1991):

A. demonstrating that a native speaker knows this aspect of syntax;

B. showing that this aspect of syntax was not learnable from the language evidence typically available to all children;

C. arguing that this aspect of syntax is not acquired from outside the mind, say by correction or explanation by the child's parents;

D. concluding that this aspect of syntax is therefore built-in to the child's mind.

Interpreted in the terms used by Pullum and Scholz (2002: 9), Stage A addresses the "acquirendum" - establishing what the speaker knows; Stage B the "lacunae" - what sentences are...