Beyond formalities: The case of language acquisition

Generative grammar retained from American structural linguistics the ‘formal’ approach, which basically effaces the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of grammar. This creates serious problems for an account of language acquisition, most especially the problem of how to link universal grammar to some particular language (the linking problem). Parameters do not help the situation, as they depend on a prior linking of the lexical and functional categories of a language to universal grammar. In contrast, usage-based accounts of language acquisition do not posit an innate universal grammar and so have no linking problem. And if children’s cognitive and social skills are conceptualized in the right way, there is no poverty of the stimulus in this approach either. In general, the only fully adequate accounts of language acquisition are those that give a prominent role to children’s comprehension of communicative function in everything from words to grammatical morphemes to complex syntactic constructions.