Chomsky [Chomsky, N., 1965. Aspects of The Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass; Chomsky, N., 1986. Knowledge of Language: its Nature, Origin, and Use. Praeger, New York] presents a series of arguments for an innate syntactic component of the language faculty. Do the arguments proposed at that time still stand, or have they been overridden by newer proposals? The current paper emphasize...

The outcome of scientific research depends on how a phenomenon is viewed and how the questions are phrased. This applies also to the nativist view of language acquisition. As a complement to MacWhinney’s discussion of nativism from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology, I would like to devote this commentary to the question of the title from the viewpoint of computational linguistics. Formally,...

Recent work exploring the evolution of human language (Berwick and Chomsky 2011; Chomsky 2005, 2007, 2010) presents the view that it is a one-time event that yielded unbounded Merge, with externalization of language as a subsequent secondary process that does not involve a genomic change. This hypothesis is embedded in the following version of the strong minimalist thesis (SMT) formulated by Ch...

0. Introduction In developing generative theories of syntax the challenge has long been to reconcile two opposite kinds of empirical evidence. On the one hand, there is substantial evidence that languages of the world are deeply similar; on the other, there is also substantial evidence that they differ on the surface. For example, there are languages which allow sentences without a pronounced s...