Does Emergentism Have a Chance

For several decades the study of language acquisition has followed two separate tracks, one devoted to the idea that the language faculty includes an inborn Universal Grammar and the other committed to the idea that it doesn’t. A central thesis of UG approaches to language is the ‘poverty of stimulus’ claim: there are principles of grammar too abstract and/or too infrequently instantiated in the input to be induced from experience—hence the need for innate grammatical principles. Is there a comparable central thesis for those opposed to Universal Grammar? Recently, a good deal of the anti-UG effort has coalesced around an approach to language and cognition known as ‘emergentism.’ Although emergentist work encompasses considerable diversity, there is arguably a consensus (or at least a near consensus) on the following point.

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