And the chief interest of the reader centres in watching the growth, not of that hatred of slavery which was inborn in Abraham Lincoln and always consistently manifested in his actions, but of his perception of the deadly nature of the feud between slavery and the Union, and of the rightfulness and necessity of crushing the one to preserve the other.
Though judged by others a pretty crude piece of kit, it was his passion, and he never ceased to try to perfect it.This compulsive tinkering was inborn.
Other times, 'Universal Grammar' is used to refer to certain specific proposals as to the content of our innate linguistic knowledge, such as the Government-Binding theorist's claim that we have inborn knowledge of such things as the Principle of Structure Dependence, Binding theory, Theta theory, the Empty Category Principle, etc.
It would be worthless to embark on moral instruction through moral proverbs and folktales, as it is done in African societies, if our character or habits were inborn.
Where the issue concerns merely their having some or other innate knowledge about language (and is neutral on the question of whether any particular theory about that knowledge is true), I will talk of 'innate linguistic information.' Clearly, an argument to the effect that speakers have inborn knowledge of UG entails the claim that they have innate linguistic information at their disposal.
A fortiori, what does not follow from this is the view that Universal Grammar (construed as a theory about the structural properties common to all natural languages, per Terminological Note 2 above) is inborn.
But underdetermination and the finiteness of the data are everyone's problem: if these features of the language learning situation per se supported nativism, then we should accept that all learning, in every domain, requires inborn domain-specific knowledge.
This brings us to the question of language evolution: if knowledge of language (say, of the principles of UG) really is inborn in the human language faculty, how did such inborn knowledge evolve?
Locke (1979/1690) argued that, all things being equal, we ought to prefer the simpler Empiricist doctrine, which posits only sense experience and general associationist learning, to the Nativist view, which adds inborn materials.
For all these truths are inborn in us from him; as a king also would have them so in his subjects, if he had power enough to write his laws in their hearts".
If this is indeed how phonological learning works, it is clear that while experience clearly plays a role, the inborn contribution to that process is quite substantial.
