It was developed to answer what its formulator called "Plato's problem".
A recent formulation reduces this theory to the knowledge of unbounded Merge. It was developed to answer what its formulator called "Plato's problem". The principles and parameters approach is an instantiation of this theoretical concept which explains variation. Daniel Everett has claimed that Piraha is a counterexample to this theory because it supposedly lacks recursion. Its proponents claim it is necessary because of the "poverty of the stimulus" argument, which states that children aren't exposed to enough data to learn language from scratch without some genetic predisposition. For ten points, name this linguistic theory which proposes that certain abstract grammatical principles are innate and manifest themselves without being taught, a concept coined by Noam Chomsky.
A recent formulation reduces this theory to the knowledge of unbounded Merge.
Universal Grammar