A Companion to Chomsky. Группа авторов
as the root ev “house” in the noun evlerimizdekilerinki meaning “the one belonging to the ones in our houses” (Hankamer 1989, p. 397). Children clearly do not hear all the words that they can produce.
Phonologist Jeff Mielke's work arguing against an innate set of phonological features also rejects APoS:
Example (6.2) Mielke (2008), The Emergence of Distinctive Features
“Many of the arguments for UG in other domains do not hold for phonology. For example, there is little evidence of a learnability problem in phonology.” [p. 33]
[Most of the evidence for] “UG is not related to phonology, and phonology has more of a guilt‐by‐association status with respect to innateness.” [p. 34]
Although Mielke dedicates a whole monograph to arguing that features can be learned, he never addresses logical arguments against such a view presented by Fodor (1980) and others, or the clear assertion by Chomsky and Halle (1965) that “one does not ‘construct features from scratch for each language’” in a response to the American Structuralist linguist Fred Householder (1965).
In a discussion of Chomsky's legacy, it is most relevant to note the divergent perspectives on such matters of phonologists who have worked in the generative tradition:
Example (6.3) Archangeli and Pulleyblank (2015) “Phonology without universal grammar”
“See Mielke [2004/8] on why features cannot be innately defined, but must be learned”
“[Children face] the challenge of isolating specific sounds from the sound stream”
“the predictions of [Emergent Grammar] fit the data better than do the predictions of UG.”
Example 6.4 Blevins (2003, p. 235), Evolutionary Phonology
“Within the domain of sounds, there is no poverty of the stimulus. [I offer] general arguments against the ‘poverty of stimulus’ in phonology, …[there is no evidence that] regular phonological alternations cannot be acquired on the basis of generalizations gleaned directly from auditory input.”
These passages clearly locate segments in the auditory input, the “sound stream,” and thus reject the radical rationalist‐internalist perspective of Chomskyan phonology alluded to above, simply expressed by Hammarberg (1976, 354): “[I]t should be perfectly obvious by now that segments do not exist outside the human mind.” Scholars denying a poverty of the stimulus problem for phonology fail to recognize the well‐established difficulty of defining invariant acoustic correlates of segments, a challenge known as the Problem of the Lack of Invariance, which is discussed insightfully by philosopher Irene Appelbaum (1996).
Finally, here is yet another phonologist, author of a popular text and co‐editor of a philosophically oriented volume on phonological knowledge (Burton‐Roberts et al. 2000) rejecting phonological internalism and nativism in one breath:
Example (6.5) Carr (2006), “Universal grammar and syntax/phonology parallelisms”
“Phonological objects and relations are internalisable: there is no poverty of the stimulus argument in phonology. No phonological knowledge is given by UG.”
Carr's quotation makes clear the logical relationship between internalism and nativism, and helps us to explain the rejection of nativism as a logical consequence of a failure to appreciate internalism: if phonology is internalisable, it need not be innate. A non‐Chomskyan linguist or psychologist studies the mind, and so is an internalist, but he or she may very well deny any interesting domain‐specific innate knowledge—think of your average connectionist. So, internalism definitely does not imply nativism. However, there is a valid implication in the other direction: Universal Grammar is a claim of innate knowledge, so a nativist in cognitive science has to be an internalist. By contraposition we know that if “nativism implies internalism” is true, then “Not‐internalism implies Not‐nativism” is also true. And that's the problem: For many phonologists, it is logically impossible that they be nativists, because they are not internalists.
Example (6.6) The relationship between internalism and nativism:
So, given the rejection of the internalist legacy of SPE, the nativist legacy stands no chance. This anti‐internalism is clear from claims in phonology, phonological acquisition, and speech perception literature that features, segments, alternations, patterns and so on are in the signal, to be found by the listener / learner. We know, however, that just as a Necker cube is not discovered by our visual faculty, but instead is invented by the mind each time it is perceived or imagined (Marr 1982), in the same way, the mind constructs phonological representations out of a limited set of innately available resources such as features. We even see this happening when we interpret the sounds of a parrot or Hoover the “talking” seal as speech—the words and segments we “hear” are definitely not out in the world.
6.4 What Is Innate?
SPE phonology explicitly adopts strict and consistent naturalism, internalism and nativism. We have indicated that much recent work rejects without justification the nativism of SPE. However, another rampant problem in the literature is an over‐eager implausible nativism, deriving, we believe, from a misreading of SPE. This work, based on the vague notion of markedness, is portrayed as a development of a passage in SPE itself:
The problem is that our approach to features, to rules and to evaluation has been overly formal. Suppose, for example, that we were systematically to interchange features or to replace [
Unfortunately, the literature on markedness ignores a later passage where Chomsky and Halle acknowledge that a formal model of phonological computation should probably not make reference to “intrinsic content” of features:
It does not seem likely that an elaboration of the theory along the lines just reviewed will allow us to dispense with phonological processes that change features fairly freely. The second stage of the Velar Softening Rule of English (40) and of the Second Velar Palatalization of Slavic strongly suggests that the phonological component requires wide latitude in the freedom to change features, along the lines of the rules discussed in the body of this book.[p. 428]
So, Chomsky and Halle conclude that the computational system that makes up the phonological module cannot be understood by reference to functional considerations of naturalness or restrictions on surface forms. This conclusion is echoed elsewhere: “Where properties of language can be explained on such ‘functional’ grounds, they provide no revealing insight into the nature of mind. Precisely because the explanations proposed here are ‘formal explanations,’ precisely because the proposed principles are not essential or even natural properties of any imaginable language, they provide a revealing mirror of the mind (if correct)” (Chomsky 1971, p. 44).
If we agree with Chomsky (2007) that “the less