  So endemic is the impoverishment of the pld, according to  Chomskyans, that it began to seem as if the entire learning paradigm  were inapplicable to language. As more and more and stricter and  stricter innate constraints needed to be imposed on the learner's  hypothesis space to account for their learning rules in the absence  of relevant data, notions like hypothesis generation and testing  seemed to have less and less purchase. This situation fuelled the  recent shift away from hypothesis testing models of language  acquisition and towards parameter setting models discussed in  §2.1 above.