Debates within the field of syntactic development frequently come down to disagreements about the very nature of language and of mental development. Indeed, one may see them either as resolving to traditional philosophical disputes (between Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism) or as three co-existing scientific paradigms. For the first time, this book presents these three approaches within two covers: (1) the Rationalism/Nativism of Noam Chomsky, (2) the Empiricism instinct in connectionist modelling of syntactic development, and (3) the Pragmatism of those such as Michael Tomasello who ad ... More

Debates within the field of syntactic development frequently come down to disagreements about the very nature of language and of mental development. Indeed, one may see them either as resolving to traditional philosophical disputes (between Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism) or as three co-existing scientific paradigms. For the first time, this book presents these three approaches within two covers: (1) the Rationalism/Nativism of Noam Chomsky, (2) the Empiricism instinct in connectionist modelling of syntactic development, and (3) the Pragmatism of those such as Michael Tomasello who adopt the ‘usage-based’ approach, in which the child is seen as constructing a grammatical inventory piece-by-piece by recruiting general learning abilities and socio-cognitive knowledge. The book is in four parts. In Part One, Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism are presented along with their empirical cash-value for psychology. In Parts Two to Four are presented the approaches to syntactic development they inspire. The author's own sympathies lie with the Chomskyan approach, sympathies which emerge along the way rather than being explicitly located. The Chomskyan approach deserves our serious attention, because this is the only approach on which the question of how thought comes to be manifested in speech is accorded the problematic status that it truly has.