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1 - What This Book Is About

from Part I - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 November 2025

Harry van der Hulst
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Summary

In this introductory chapter, I will outline what this book is about and aims to achieve, which is to continue what I started in a prequel book, A Mind for Language: An Introduction to the Innateness Debate (ML). Both books share the same central theme, namely the so-called Innateness Hypothesis for language, which is the conjecture proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky many decades ago that children acquire language guided by an innate, genetically based mental system that is specifically dedicated to this task. Both ML and this book critically examine the arguments that have been used, or could be used, to support this idea. Where ML considered arguments coming from linguistics proper, the present book delves into arguments from neighboring fields that overlap with linguistics in various ways, including cognitive science and neurolinguistics. The chapter concludes with a review of the linguistic arguments in support of Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis that formed the focus of ML.

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Chapter
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Genes, Brains, Evolution and Language
The Innateness Debate Continued
, pp. 3 - 16
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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