A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment. The first section presents several general observations about language acquisition that linguistic theory has tried to explain and discusses the thesis that certain linguistic properties are innate because they appear universally and in the absence of corresponding experience. A third diagnostic for innateness, (...) early emergence, is the focus of the second section of the paper, in which linguistic theory is tested against recent experimental evidence on children's acquisition of syntax. (shrink)

According to a widespread view the lexicon is a kind of appendix to the grammar, whose function is to list what is unpredictable and irregular about the words of a language. In more recent studies it has been acquiring a rich internal organization of its own and is becoming recognized as the site of pervasive grammatical regularities. The particular approach to the lexicon that I will assume in this paper comes out of this trend, integrating several ideas from work on (...) both morphology and phonology in the seventies. I shall begin by outlining the central assumptions and their motivation, and proceed to a series of issues raised by this framework which,have to do with the proper formulation of word—formation processes. (shrink)