> On Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:03:21 -0400
> ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
>
> > Wait, that's not true, is it? Chomsky's UG is not the English grammar
> > we know and hate, but a more abstract one which will probably be
> > satisfied by literal transcripts, etc. No?
>
> And what kids hear is a mishmash. People don't finish their
> sentences. They forget what the subject was. They get lost in a
> subordinate clause and never climb out. How does the kid distinguish
> the badly-formed utterances from the well-formed ones?
>
> It's a bit like the deconvolution algorithm for sharpening
> a blurry image. It works quite well *if* you have some information
> about the way the image was created in the first place. The UG postulate
> is that necessary information information about how the image
> was created. (This is my analogy not Chomsky's.)
>
Isn't the fundamental assumption here that kids learn to speak in grammatically correct sentences? Half of the college students I've taught at Research I and II universities - and more at the second tier small college I taught at, don't speak or write in grammatically correct sentences... is this a problem for the theory? Or is it enough that short, declarative sentences that express generally pretty simplistic thoughts are grammatical? Obviously, I don't know enough about this... and the little I am learning bugs me.