[Tainnor]

By now, the Chomskian approach to linguistics is not unchallenged anymore and there is some doubt on whether the "poverty of stimulus" argument holds any water (see e.g. [1]).

IMHO, modern cognitive science based approaches (such as by Tomasello and others) have a better chance of explaining how language is acquired than the hypothesising of the 70s.

I don't have time now to go into more references, but the question is far from settled.

[1] https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2015/06/07/p-is-for-pov...

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I agree that the matter is not settled [edit: in the sense that there is criticism of Chomskian linguistics, from linguists] and that there is debate on the poverty of the stimulus and universal grammar etc, but the post you link to is not a very good summary of it. I recommend Alexander Clark's "Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus" for a good look on the subject from the non-Chomskian poit of view.

Note however that, as far as I understand it, there is no controversy about the lack of negative examples of language given to children by their parents.

[Tainnor]

Fair, I just looked for the first reference I could find. I haven't done any real linguistics in years, although I vividly remember the arguments. Especially that Evans & Levinson article 10 years or so back ("The Myth of language universals") which generated quite some heat. If I have time, I will check out your reference.

Not sure about the negative examples; but language acquisition was never my focus area anyway.

I would just generally be cautious about applying formal language theory too readily to linguistics, that's all I wanted to say.