Last spring, readers of Forbes, Fortune, Business Week and The Wall Street Journal probably noticed the striking ad, a Star-Warsy image of satellite battle stations, featuring voice, data, video and facsimile communications, not lasers, as the latest weaponry
Short overestimated the ability of the gun factory to meet its obligation, especially in light of labor shortages due to voluntary and conscriptive military service and the reluctance of military commanders to detach men from their units to work in the factory.
They are shoutings of a layman expecting the fall of the besieged Jericho, but with no more definite preadvertisement of the policy that should follow the fall than was implied in the fact that the priests who were loudest in blowing the rams' horns for the surrender were Milton's five Presbyterian friends, the Smectymnuans.
In short, the twin assumptions that syntactic rules are category-based, and that there are a highly restricted finite set of categories in any natural language (perhaps no more than a dozen major categories), together with the assumption that the child either knows (innately) or learns (by experience) that all rules are structure-dependent ( =category-based), provide a highly plausible model of language acquisition, in which languages become learnable in a relatively short, finite period of time (a few years).