 Equating Gold’s idea of restricting the class of grammars with the idea of a ‘rationalist’ knowledge acquisition theory, Wexler and Culicover try to draw out the consequences of Gold’s paradigm for the Essentialist linguistic theory of Chomsky (1965). They show how a very tightly restricted class of transformational grammars could be regarded as text-identifiable under extremely strong assumptions (e.g., that all languages have the same innately known deep structures).