Development of the concept of “the poverty of the stimulus”

Abstract

'The poverty of the stimulus' is a key concept within generative linguistics. This article attempts in three ways to better understand the nature of that concept and the context of its use: first, by narrating its history from the late 1950s to the present day; second, by analyzing the properties of a family of terms (including the poverty of the stimulus) which generativists have developed to refer to the relationship between input to language learners and their linguistic competence; and third, by examining some examples of how the poverty of the stimulus has been differently construed in recent discourse about linguistics and about language acquisition.