Poverty of the stimulus and yes-no interrogatives in English

Abstract

This article deals with the classic example of "poverty of the linguistic stimulus", which concerns the formation of yes-no interrogative sentences in English. Young children have been claimed to acquire a subject-auxiliary inversion rule (SAI) without being exposed to the data necessary to learn it. According to the traditional conclusion, that acquisition is made possible by an innate structure-dependence (SD) principle. We first show that young English-speaking children do have access to some of the supposedly "relevant evidence" in this example and that other kinds of data might be just as important. Next, we examine Chomsky's recent "minimalist" analysis of yes-no interrogatives, which abandons the SD principle but introduces new equally problematic hypotheses. Finally, we argue that the early acquisition of a general question-formation operation such as SAI is not compatible with the results of studies on young children's questions and other linguistic productions. Those results are instead shown to be consistent with a constructional and usage-based approach to language.

Keywords

• language acquisition
• poverty of the stimulus
• yes-no interrogatives
• usage-based models of language
• cognitive grammar