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THE ‘LANGUAGE INSTINCT’ DEBATE: REVISED EDITION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2007
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THE ‘LANGUAGE INSTINCT’ DEBATE: REVISED EDITION. Geoffrey Sampson. New York: Continuum, 2005. Pp. xiii + 224. $130 cloth, $39.95 paper.
This volume, a revised version of Sampson's (1997) Educating Eve, is an empiricist response to linguistic nativism. Accordingly, the volumes's primary objective is to challenge the view that there is an innate component specifically responsible for the human linguistic capacity. This new edition presents insights from corpus linguistics, which are used to refute the original poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments. The introductory chapter gives a historical overview of the nativist doctrine by distinguishing between the original writings of Chomsky and present-day nativists such as Bickerton and Pinker. In this chapter, Sampson also introduces his view of language acquisition as a hypothesis-testing interplay between the learner and the environment, ideas that he attributes to Popper.
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