  The impact of Chomsky on linguistics and cognitive science has been much discussed. Here we briefly review some of the elements critical to the resurgence of  Nativism.[3] Chomsky focused attention on two facts about human languages: (1) that they are very complex, and (2) that children come to master them without much systematic training. The second fact is fairly obvious, but the first is not. A very important step, as far as Nativism is concerned, was Chomsky’s notion of a generative grammar as a framework for articulating the complexity of a language. A generative grammar of a particular language is a system of rules that generates all (and only) the sentences of that language, along with a characterization of how each sentence sounds and what it means. Chomskyan linguistics is the project of discovering the elements and structure of such rule systems.