ABSTRACT
There can be little doubt that the idea of innate knowledge of grammar is of contemporary theoretical relevance. This chapter examines the reasoning that led to the idea in the first place. It deals with the logic underlying the decision to ask how grammar is acquired. The inference of innateness from the discrepancy between the explicit achievement of linguists and the tacit achievement of ordinary human beings rests on two assumptions. The first is that ordinary humans process their linguistic experiences in a fashion analogous to linguists. The second is that ordinary humans have linguistic experiences that are essentially equivalent to those of linguists. Insofar as transformational rules take complete phrase markers and delete/permute items in their terminal strings they simplify the grammar quite considerably but, equally clearly, they differ from phrase structure rules. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
