istic methods for syntax, just as for a long time McCarthy and Hayes (1969) discouraged exploration of probabilistic methods in Artificial Intelligence. Among his arguments were that: (i) Probabilistic models wrongly mix in world knowledge (New York occurs more in text than Dayton, Ohio, but for no linguistic reason), (ii) Probabilistic models don't model grammaticality (neither Colorless green ideas sleep furiously nor Furiously sleep ideas green colorless have previously been uttered -- and hence must be estimated to have probability zero, Chomsky wrongly assumes -- but the former is grammatical while the latter is not, and (iii) Use of probabilities does not meet the goal of describing the mind-internal I-language as opposed to the observed-in-the-world E-language. This chapter is not meant to be a detailed critique of Chomsky's arguments -- Abney (1996) provides a survey and a rebuttal, and Pereira (2000) has further useful discussion -- but some of these concerns are still importa

The same categorical phenomena which are attributed to hard grammatical constraints in some languages continue to show up as statistical preferences in other languages, motivating a grammatical model that can account for soft constraints. The effects of a hierarchy of person (1st, 2nd 3rd) on grammar are categorical in some languages, most famously in languages with inverse systems, but also in languages with person restrictions on passivization. In Lummi, for example, the person of the subject argument cannot be lower than the person of a nonsubject argument. If this would happen in the active, passivization is obligatory; if it would happen in the passive, the active is obligatory (Jelinek and Demers 1983). These facts follow from the theory of harmonic alignment in OT: constraints favoring the harmonic association of prominent person (1st, 2nd) with prominent syntactic function (subject) are hypothesized to be present as subhierarchies of the grammars of all languages, but to vary ...

This thesis is a qualitative and quantitative study of the changes that occurred in the phrase structure and system of pronominal clitics in medieval and renaissance Spanish, with the goal of explaining the basic differences between the syntactic properties of clitics in Old Spanish and their counterparts in the various dialects of modern Spanish. Specifically, I argue that these differences are explainable if we classify OSp clitics as Second Position (2P) clitics, in contrast to their modern counterparts. 2P clitics are treated here as prosodically deficient phrasal constituents that appear displaced from their canonical positions as internal arguments of the verb and are adjoined to a phrasal projection at the left edge of the clause (IP). The elements encompassed under the pre-theoretical notion clitic in modern Spanish, however, are not linked to an argument ...

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In this paper, we propose that the Root Infinitive (RI) phenomenon in child language is best viewed and explained as a morphological learning problem. We make the following specific suggestions: • The optionality in RI reflects the presence of a grammar such as Chinese which does not manifest tense marking. • The gradual elimination of the Chinese-style grammar is facilitated by the learning of the morphosyntactic system of the target language. • Quantitative differences among morphosyntactic systems result in the cross-linguistic variation in the RI phenomenon. More broadly, we aim to demonstrate that quantitative aspects of language learning data and concrete mechanisms of the language learning process can play an important role in the generative approach to language acquisition. In section 1, we give a brief overview of the RI literature along with methodological re-marks regarding the explanation of the phenomenon. In section 2, we lay out our approach to morphosyntactic learning, which builds on and complements the ideas from previous analyses. Section 3 presents a quantitative study of child-directed Spanish, English, and French. We show that quantitative differences in the morphosyntactic systems of these three languages explain the brief RI stage in Spanish acquisition, the prolonged RI stage in English acquisition, as well as the intermediate status of the RI stage in French. Section 4 is the conclusion. 1

A single speaker's production of variable outputs for the same input often reflects categorical generalizations across grammars. Variation in subject-verb agreement in English dialects and varieties has just this property. For example, previous studies of verb agreement in `nonstandard' English varieties have observed a reduction of variation with plural (vs. singular) subjects or negative (vs. armative) sentences; these are typologically marked grammatical contexts in which contrasts are often categorically

The topic of this paper is a rather curious phenomenon of syntactic change in the history of

killing interest in probabilistic methods for syntax, just as for a long time McCarthy and Hayes (1969) discouraged exploration of probabilistic methods in Articial Intelligence. Among his arguments were that: (i) Probabilistic models wrongly mix in world knowledge (New York occurs more in text than Dayton, Ohio, but for no linguistic reason), (ii) Probabilistic models don't model grammaticality (neither Colorless green ideas sleep furiously or Furiously sleep ideas green colorless have previously been uttered and hence have probability zero, Chomsky assumes but the former is grammatical while the latter is not, and (iii) Use of probabilities does not meet the goal of describing the mind-internal I-language as opposed to the observed-in-the-world E-language. This chapter is not meant to be a detailed critique of Chomsky's arguments Abney (1996) provides a survey and a rebuttal, and Pereira (2000) has useful further discussion but some of these

The verb inflections of Bengali underwent a series of phonological change between 10 th and 18 th centuries, which gave rise to several modern dialects of the language. In this paper, we offer a functional explanation for this change by quantifying the functional pressures of ease of articulation, perceptual contrast and learnability through objective functions or constraints, or both. The multi-objective and multi-constraint optimization problem has been solved through genetic algorithm, whereby we have observed the emergence of Pareto-optimal dialects in the system that closely resemble some of the real ones. 1

A prevalent form of explanation for universals of language (expounded in many of Chomsky’s works, e.g., Chomsky, 1965) links linguists ’ theoretical descriptions of languages with language acquisition. From my own perspective, this generative approach is only partially adequate, as the title of this section suggests. The next paragraph below sketches a typical way in which generative linguists steer a tactical course between what is significantly common to all languages (thus potentially hypothesized to be linked to some bias in language acquisition) and what is idiosyncratic to particular languages (implicitly because of some other, usually unspecified, processes). Linguists are interested in the common framework on which all languages are built, that is, in universals of language; they also have to cope with the great diversity of languages. General scientific methodology dictates that the description of each language should be as elegant and economical as possible, consistent with the facts. This pushes the linguist to formulate general synchronic rules and principles as the “core grammar ” of a language, with lists of idiosyncratic facts treated as peripheral. The lexicon, a store of arbitrary sound-meaning links, is the most obvious “peripheral ” component. Somewhere between general principles applying to the core grammars of all languages and the idiosyncratic lexicon are the values of parameters fixed during language acquisition (Chomsky, 1981). Fixing a parameter amounts to making a generalization over, for example, head-dependent constituent order, or whether the language permits null subjects, or the precise barriers to syntactic movement rules. Languages vary along these parameters, and this variation, along with the arbitrary facts of the lexicon, contributes to the diversity of languages.