Abstract

The paradigm of generative approaches to language acquisition is the focus of critical attention here. Although much ink has been spent on the comparative merits of different approaches, this can detract from attention to the details within a paradigm. Thus what is not part of this paper is any attempt to compare competing paradigms in language acquisition research. The task of reviewing twenty years of intense research is too grandiose: instead, four representative lines of empirical work with broad theoretical significance and a substantial cross-linguistic base are chosen to illustrate how debates within the paradigm are structured. Theoretical and methodological commitments of researchers can be seen to vary considerably, and most importantly, to interact. The goal is a selective map to reveal the structure of arguments, and to ask whether we are making progress. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 1.1 the two basic principles that provide the title to this paper are introduced, together with a sketch of the reasons why the four empirical examples are chosen. In Section 1.2 a more complete history of the principles is given, after which in Section 2, the general character of the arguments used

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