Verb movement in Biblical Aramaic: introduction

Abstract

The activity in which you are engaged at this moment is reading and understanding an English sentence which you have never seen before and may well never see again. You may ask, how is it possible to understand a sentence which has never been seen? Or, to put it in a different way in terms of the logical problem relating to language acquisition: how is it possible for a child, given his inadequate information about and strictly limited experience of language, to acquire the highly complex and vibrant system reflected in his knowledge of language? Chomsky refers to this logical problem as Plato’s problem: in what manner is it at all possible for us to know so much with so little data at hand? Only because the human being has at his disposal inborn and genetically determined powers.