Geoffrey Pullum and the Argument from Poverty of Stimulus

The room was packed to the rafters; a basement lecture theatre, as sweaty as the armpit of Satan and woefully inadequate for the nature of the event it was hosting. It was stuffed with what seemed like half the academic community of Edinburgh, all eager to see the new Chair of General Linguistics, the renowned Geoffrey Pullum, deliver a stinging rebuke to linguistic nativism. Pullum, a tall, pleasant man with an implausibly high waistband and the look of a high school physics teacher, was in a playfully combative mood. The talk was remarkably balanced, whilst serving quite powerfully to rally the troops. Pullum restated his and Barbara Scholz’s position on linguistic nativism and systematically dismantled the attacks against them from the Chomskian camp.