The "(no) negative evidence" problem

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Bonn (Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie), course: Language Acquisition - Psycholinguistik, language: English, abstract: This paper aims at exploring how the views on language acquisition have developed over time, where they conflict each other and whether it is possible to position oneself on either side. The ¿nature vs nurture¿ debate is an everlasting discussion, not only in the area of linguistics, but science in general. This is what makes it particularly interesting because there is always new information to expect. Furthermore, it is an issue not limited to academic discourse only, but one that appears in everyday conversation. An interesting aspect of language acquisition, more specifically the knowledge of language, is the question if children arrive at such knowledge by the mere exposure to ¿positive evidence¿, i.e. the language of adults they are surrounded with, or if negative evidence also has an impact, i.e. children¿s knowledge of language is based on explicit or implicit feedback to whether an utterance was in some way incorrect. The two terms will be defined and looked into in more detail in the second chapter. In the following, the correlation between the ¿nature vs nurture¿ debate and language acquisition will be explained first. The respective chapter provides a brief insight into how the nativist approach developed, mainly based on Chomsky¿s (1988) notion of ¿Universal Grammar¿ (UG), and the type of criticism it brought along. It further explains the connection between the respective theories and the grammatical aspect of language acquisition. In the last section, the main problems of experience-based language learning will be displayed and defined. The third chapter starts with a section dedicated to where the particular view that humans need innate structures for a correct knowledge of language stems from. It continues with a detailed look on the ¿(no) negative evidence¿ problem. The (non-)existence of negative evidence and which role it plays in terms of language acquisition will be explored from different standpoints by nativists as well as non-nativists.