Introduction

This introductory chapter describes the structure and organization of this book, which is about state-of-the-art research on language structure and language growth in the child. The Poverty of the Stimulus (POS), i.e., the richness of the language acquired by the child on the meager basis of the episodic, variable, and only implicitly structured, linguistic input, continues to mystify linguists today as it did decades ago. Despite several old and new attacks on POS, one point appears incontrovertible: sufficiently rich internal resources must be attributed to the child in order to have some hope of solving this puzzle. What these resources are, and why they are what they are, is the central concern of the subsequent chapters of this book.