But the thing is, in a very general and permissive sense, even these badly-formed utterances are well-formed in a UG sense. They have a particular structure to them that is consistent, even if the sentence meanders, or trails off, etc. Let me explain my understanding this way:
Chomskyan structure is a second level of abstraction if standard grammar and sentence construction rules are a first level. Children do seem to get confused by mistakes in the first level syntax and even repeat those errors -- American English is a rich source of such examples for me ;-). But all these sentences, as well as sentences uttered by the child, are fully consistent with the Chomskyan UG structure/grammar which remains invariant across languages and utterances. Most adults do not utter the sort of sentences that Chris Doss offered as an example. Yet without such negative examples, the child, from the start, exhibits an amazing conformance to UG.
Wait a minute... I thought I am arguing against poverty of input and you are arguing for it? ;-)
>> That's a fair summary of what I was saying. One more thing: just as
>> in
>> the Creator theory, but to a lesser degree, the postulated entity
>> offers no explanatory benefit, and if some child behavioural
>> psychologists are to be believed, it has negative predictive benefit.
>
> Those of us who find the poverty-of-input argument persuasive
> believe that it explains something which otherwise needs explaining.
> Are there competing explanations these days? Since I haven't
> really kept up, there's a lot of recent work that I won't have
> read.
>
I have no idea either, but the methodology of science (so to say) is to leave open questions, well, open, isn't it? Isn't that the much ballyhooed difference from religion? i.e., we do not postulate entities willy-nilly to explain something which otherwise needs explaining? Of course the "willy-nilly" is what we are arguing about here under the phrase "poverty of input". And I suppose one can treat this "language faculty" as the sort of constant that physicists employed that were substituted with fundamental equations at a later date. Time for a breather, and to turn our attention back to "evolution" of language and Miles' constructivism/constructionism? ;-)
--ravi