Lightfoot, D.W. (1991), How to Set Parameters: arguments from language change, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....be able to use language appropriately in di#erent contexts; and they must learn the grammar that corresponds to their language. However, the data to which children are exposed is so limited that it cannot provide an explanation of how it is that children achieve all the aspects of the mature state [Lightfoot 1991]. This problem, known as the poverty of the stimulus, arises because, in general, the learner is exposed to simple grammatical input, which for the most part consists of sentences without much embedding, and, as observed by Gleitman and Wanner [1982] that are propositionally simple, limited in ....

....observed by Gleitman and Wanner [1982] that are propositionally simple, limited in vocabulary, slowly and carefully enunciated, repetitive, deictic, and usually referring to the here and now . So how can children based on this data arrive at a mature state that is so sophisticated According to Lightfoot [1991], the input to which children are exposed is poor in three ways [from Lightfoot 1991, p. 3] The child s experience is finite, but the capacity eventually attained ranges over an infinite domain, and therefore must incorporate some recursive property not demanded by experience . Children do ....

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Lightfoot, D. How to Set Parameters: Arguments from Language Change. Bradford Book, 1991.

....G n , where n is some nite integer. During the language acquisition phase, each child has to decide which grammar is the actual grammar of its parent, based on a nite number of the input sentences, b, that the child receives during the language acquisition period (see Osherson et al. 1986) Lightfoot (1991, 1999) Niyogi Berwick (1996, 1997) Niyogi (1998) Note that the number of candidate grammars can also be innite, provided that children have a prior probability distribution specifying that some grammars are more likely than others. In this paper, however, we shall restrict our analyses to ....

Lightfoot, D. 1991 How to set parameters: arguments from language change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

.... Order in Early Middle English Anthony Kroch Ann Taylor University of Pennsylvania February 2000 1 Introduction In the standard account (Canale 1978, Kemenade 1987, Lightfoot 1991), there is a sharp divide in word order between Old and Middle English. Old English is INFLfinal and OV while Middle English is INFL medial and VO. 1 Indeed, Lightfoot gives an account of the transition from Old to Middle English based on a catastrophic reanalysis in the twelfth century ....

....1991) there is a sharp divide in word order between Old and Middle English. Old English is INFLfinal and OV while Middle English is INFL medial and VO. 1 Indeed, Lightfoot gives an account of the transition from Old to Middle English based on a catastrophic reanalysis in the twelfth century (Lightfoot 1991, 1999) and, viewed from a certain distance, this story has considerable plausibility. Thus, up until the entry for 1122 CE, the syntax of the Peterborough version of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, the manuscript which extends furthest into the twelfth century, is that of standard literary Old ....

Lightfoot, David. 1991. How to set parameters: Arguments from language change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

....helpful feedback on aspects of the work described in this paper. In particular, Bob Berwick, Miriam Eckert and Jim Hurford made suggestions which influenced the subsequent development and presentation of this work. In addition, Ann Copestake, Gerald Gazdar, Hans van Halteren, Simon Kirby, David Lightfoot, David Milward, Geoff Pullum and four anonymous reviewers for Language kindly gave comments on earlier drafts which helped considerably improve the present one. 1 1 Theoretical Background It is widely accepted that language acquisition is guided by an innate language acquisition procedure and a ....

....(1996) for recent positive summaries and discussion of this evidence. See Sampson (1989) for a dissenting view. 2 an incorrect grammar (Clark, 1992; Gibson and Wexler, 1994; Niyogi and Berwick, 1996; Wexler and Manzini, 1987) Gibson and Wexler (1994) formalize the concept of a trigger (e.g. Lightfoot, 1992:13f) as a simple (unembedded or degree 0) sentence of primary linguistic data which signals the value of some parameter and can serve to guide the learner to the target grammar. The notion of a trigger is a refinement of that of primary linguistic data, which, through context of use, ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Lightfoot, David (1992) How to Set Parameters: Arguments from language Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

....of constructions, such as morphological negation or non compositional idioms. And, most parameters of grammatical variation set during language acquisition appear to have default or so called unmarked values retained in the absence of robust counter evidence (e.g. Bickerton, 1984; Hyams, 1986; Lightfoot, 1992). A variety of explanations have been offered for the emergence of a partially innate language acquisition device (LAD) with such properties based on saltation (Berwick, 1998; Bickerton, 1990, 1998) or genetic assimilation (Pinker and Bloom, 1990) But none provide a coherent detailed account of ....

Lightfoot, D. (1992) How to Set Parameters: Arguments from language Change, MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma..

....the learner s innate bioprogram; first language learners exposed exclusively to an impoverished pidgin subset language acquire a superset creole grammar. If this view is correct, then it would undermine the claim that significant language change can be modelled as an evolutionary process. However, Lightfoot (1992:178f; 1999:167f) while accepting the abruptness of creolisation, challenges the idea that it requires a special account of language acquisition, arguing that properties of the pidgin triggering data lead to reanalysis and consequent parameter resetting across generations. Roberts (1998) argues ....

....a less parsable construction will be replaced by a more parsable variant. However, a more complex and adequate model of grammar learning, such as that of Kirby (1999) may make very different predictions. For example, if learning involves setting parameters on the basis of degree 0 triggers (e.g. Lightfoot, 1992), then embedded constructions will be learnt indirectly as a predictive consequence of simpler triggers, and thus will continue to be inherited by subsequent generations if the interaction of parameter settings generates centre and or self embedded constructions, though their acceptability in ....

Lightfoot, D. (1992) How to Set Parameters: Arguments from language Change, MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma..

....between grammars see Kroch 1989b, 1994, Pintzuk 1991, Santorini 1992, Taylor 1990, 1994. reanalysis which leads to this outcome is obscured by the collapse of Old English as a written language in the early 12th century and the paucity of Middle English documents in the earliest period (see Lightfoot 1991, Pintzuk 1991, 1993 for further discussion) The existence of INFL final main clauses in Old English indicates that, at some point before the period documented by texts, its grammar must have been consistently SOV and INFL final, a configuration presumably inherited from proto Germanic and ....

Lightfoot, David W. 1991. How to set parameters: arguments from language change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

....need to discover what the detailed properties of her grammar are, but rather needs only to determine which among the finite set of possible grammars is hers. Finally, it is usually assumed that parameters can be set on the basis of relatively simple data which occurs frequently in the input (cf. Lightfoot (1991), but also Gibson and Wexler (1994) and Frank and Kapur (to appear) This would seem to imply that parameters should be set, and consequently grammars should be acquired, both quickly and easily. Unfortunately, this beautiful picture conflicts with what we know from empirical studies of language ....

Lightfoot, David. 1991. How to Set Parameters: Arguments from Language Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

....is effected by linguistic selection. Kirby s (1996) argument takes on board the notion that PLD is filtered in such a way to produce triggers. That is that not all linguistic data that is heard by a child learner is actually used by the child as a trigger in their acquisition of language (Lightfoot 1991), and that parsing preference itself plays a role in the cycle of language acquisition an use. CHAPTER 2. BACKGROUND 12 Kroch (1989) as mentioned earlier, discusses historical data showing with two competing linguistic forms, how one can replace the other, proposing a simple logistic model to ....

....that the assumption that only unembedded sentences form the triggers that are used by a learner in acquiring language is taken here. This issue is not discussed as it is an assumed part of the framework being employed. For a full detailed discussion and evidence to support this assumption see Lightfoot (1991). X 0 X V Comp O comp first = 0 X 0 Comp O X V comp first = 1 XP X 0 Spec S spec first = 0 XP Spec S X 0 spec first = 1 Figure 3.1. Parts of the parse trees affected by the two base word order parameter CHAPTER 3. REPLICATION 20 XP Spec S X 0 X V Comp O comp first = 0 ....

Lightfoot, D. (1991), How To Set Parameters: Arguments from Language Change, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

....helpful feedback on aspects of the work described in this paper. In particular, Bob Berwick, Miriam Eckert and Jim Hurford made suggestions which influenced the subsequent development and presentation of this work. In addition, Ann Copestake, Gerald Gazdar, Hans van Halteren, Simon Kirby, David Lightfoot, David Milward, Geoff Pullum and two anonymous reviewers for Language kindly gave comments on earlier drafts which helped considerably improve the present one. 1 Theoretical Background It is widely accepted that language acquisition is guided by an innate language acquisition procedure and a ....

.... defined by these models contain local maxima and subset superset relations which may cause a learner to converge to an incorrect grammar (Clark, 1992; Gibson and Wexler, 1994; Niyogi and Berwick, 1996; Wexler and Manzini, 1987) Gibson and Wexler (1994) formalize the concept of a trigger (e.g. Lightfoot, 1992:13f) as a simple (unembedded or degree 0) sentence of primary linguistic data which signals the value of some parameter and can serve to guide the learner to the target grammar. The notion of a trigger is a refinement of that of primary linguistic data, which, through context of use, ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

Lightfoot, D. (1992) How to Set Parameters: Arguments from language Change, MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma..

....use, in every attested human language, of non compositional constructions, such as morphological negation or idioms. And, most parameters of grammatical variation set during language acquisition appear to have default values retained in the absence of robust counter evidence (e.g. Bickerton, 1984; Lightfoot, 1992; Briscoe, 1997, 1998a,b) A variety of explanations have been offered for the emergence of a partially innate language acquisition device (LAD) with such properties, such as biological saltation (Chomsky, 1972; Berwick, 1998; Bickerton, 1998) or genetic assimilation (Pinker and Bloom, 1990; ....

Lightfoot, D. (1992) How to Set Parameters: Arguments from language Change, MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma..

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Lightfoot, D.W. (1991), How to Set Parameters: arguments from language change, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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David Lightfoot. How to Set Parameters: Arguments from Language Change. MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1992.

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