Noam Chomsky's hypothesis that humans possess an innate, species-specific faculty for language — a universal grammar — that constrains the possible form of human languages and enables rapid first-language acquisition.
Explains the poverty of the stimulus: children acquire a complex grammar from insufficient input, implying that the basic structure of language is biologically specified. All human languages share underlying structural properties reflecting this innate faculty.
No conceptual lineage found.
No recorded contemporaries.
No recorded minds influenced.
No conceptual posterity found.
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