>> ...The "poverty of stimulus" agrument is one of the good things I am
willing
>> to give Chomsky credit for.
>>
>I always understood that argument to be: look how fast kids learn language,
>therefore behaviorism is false and language is innate. Did I miss some
>subtlety?
I don't want to get too deep into this since I'm a rank amateur in linguistics. But I may have something to add here.
What about pidgin (sp?) languages being transfomed by the next generation into creoles? My (limited understanding) of this phenomenon is that a pidgin is a mish-mash of existing languages, and often come about when adults that speak different languages are all thrown into the same community. Pidgin sentences might be the grammatic equivalent of "Went to store, bought milk." The children of these adults, however, actually impose grammatical rules and create a new language (the creole), where the equivalent sentence in the creole would be "I went to the store and bought a carton of milk."
Since the creole is literally a new language, this an argument against behaviorism.
Brett