David Lightfoot

The child's trigger experience: Degree-0 learnability

According to a “selective” (as opposed to “instructive”) model of human language capacity, people come to know more than they experience. The discrepancy between experience and eventual capacity (the “poverty of the stimulus”) is bridged by genetically provided information. Hence any hypothesis about the linguistic genotype (or “Universal Grammar,” UG) has consequences for what experience is needed and what form peoples mature capacities (or “grammars”) will take. This BBS target article discusses the “trigger experience,” that is, the experience that actually affects a childs linguistic development. It is argued that this must be a subset of a childs total linguistic experience and hence that much of what a child hears has no consequence for the form of the eventual grammar. UG filters experience and provides an upper bound on what constitutes the triggering experience. This filtering effect can often be seen in the way linguistic capacity can change between generations. Children only need access to robust structures of minimal (“degree-0”) complexity. Everything can be learned from simple, unembedded “domains” (a grammatical concept involved in defining an expressions logical form). Children do not need access to more complex structures.

Catastrophic change and learning theory

Abstract This paper argues that language change sometimes takes place through an abrupt change in grammars, reflecting a new parameter setting. In that case, one cannot view language acquisition as a function of children matching their input, in the way that most learnability models portray it. The paper outlines a ‘cue-based’ theory of language acquisition, wherein the definition of a parameter incorporates a structural cue. Language acquisition proceeds as children scan their linguistic environment for these cues and set parameters accordingly. Two case-studies are offered, illustrating the cue-based learning theory and how it may be used to explain historical change.

How long was the nineteenth century

This paper reviews the problems of the deterministic and predictive view of language change initiated by nineteenth century linguists and shows that such a view is still present in many analyses proposed by twentieth century linguists. As an alternative to such a view, the paper discusses an approach along the lines of Niyogi and Berwick (1997), which takes the explanation for long-term tendencies to be a function of the architecture of UG and the learning procedure and of the way in which populations of speakers behave.

Grammars for People.

LA. examine differentes conceptions de la grammaire developpees dans la litterature linguistique et definit la notion biologique et la notion sociale de grammaire. Il discute ensuite les faiblesses de la notion sociale de grammaire developpee par Traugott et Smith (1993)

Government: the long and short of it'

Jean-Roger Vergnauds open letter to Chomsky in April I977 was an important, although often unappreciated, event in the emergence of the Government-Binding approach to syntactic theory. There he proposed that some of the filters of Chomsky & Lasnik (I977) could be eliminated or simplified with the notion of an abstract Governed Case. From this emerged the familiar Case Filter, whereby phonetic NPs and variables have Case, and the idea that Case is assigned under conditions of government, analogous to the way that thematic roles are assigned. Government thus became the unifying concept, underlying principles of Case, thematic roles and eventually much more. The guiding intuition was that government was an extremely local relationship, essentially sisterhood and typically the relation between a head and its complement. The notion was stretched plausibly to allow expect to govern and assign case to them in I expect them to arrive on time under an exceptional (but learnable) operation of S Deletion, but strict sisterhood remained the intuitive basis for government. Meanwhile, as ideas about Government-Binding theories were emerging, for example, during the Pisa workshop of 1979, some ill-understood matters were tossed into a can called RES(NIC), the residue of the earlier Nominative Island Condition, which had required that a nominative anaphor be locally bound: