Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition

Cross-linguistic Perspectives -- Volume 1: Heads, Projections, and Learnability -- Volume 2: Binding, Dependencies, and Learnability

(Vol.1)Barbara Lust, Margarita Su¤er, John Whitman, (Vol.2)Barbara Lust, Gabriella Hermon, Barbara Lust

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780805813500
• eBook ISBN: 9781317728801
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of both the fundamental principles for all possible languages and the language faculty in the "initial state" of the human organism. These two volumes approach the study of UG by joint, tightly linked studies of both linguistic theory and human competence for language acquisition. In particular, the volumes collect comparable studies across a number of different languages, carefully analyzed by a wide range of international scholars.

The issues surrounding cross-linguistic variation in "Heads, Projections, and Learnability" (Volume 1) and in "Binding, Dependencies, and Learnability" (Volume 2) are arguably the most fundamental in UG. How can principles of grammar be learned by general learning theory? What is biologically programmed in the human species in order to guarantee their learnability? What is the true linguistic representation for these areas of language knowledge? What universals exist across languages?

The two volumes summarize the most critical current proposals in each area, and offer both theoretical and empirical evidence bearing on them. Research on first language acquisition and formal learnability theory is placed at the center of debates relative to linguistic theory in each area. The convergence of research across several different disciplines -- linguistics, developmental psychology, and computer science -- represented in these volumes provides a paradigm example of cognitive science.

Contents of Volume 1

Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives

VOLUME 1 HEADS, PROJECTIONS, AND LEARN ABILITY

List of Contributors

Preface

Table of Contents for Volume 2

General Introduction: Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives

Barbara Lust, Isabella Barbier, Claire Foley, Gabriella Hermon, Shyam Kapur, Jaklin Kornfilt, Zelmira Nuñez del Prado, Margarita Suñer, John Whitman

Volume 1 Introduction: Constraining Structural Variation and the Acquisition Problem

John Whitman, Isabella Barbier, Katharina Boser, Shyam Kapur, Jaklin Kornfilt, Barbara Lust

1 SYNTACTIC FOUNDATIONS: PHRASE STRUCTURE PRINCIPLES AND PARAMETERS

More on Chinese Word Order and Parametric Theory

C.-T. James Huang

Negative Heads and Negative Operators: The NEG Criterion

Liliane Haegeman

Constraints on Argument Structure

Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser

II FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES AND PHRASE STRUCTURE IN THE INITIAL STATE

HEADS AND PROJECTIONS IN MORPHOSYNTAX

Minimal Projection and Clause Structure

Jane Grimshaw

Functional Projection of CP and Phrase Structure Parameterization: An Argument for the Strong Continuity Hypothesis

Barbara Lust

On the Underspecification of Functional Categories in Early Grammars

Katherine Demuth

Tense and Agreement Variability in Child Grammars of English

Andrew Radford

Case-Marking Particles and Phrase Structure in Early Japanese Acquisition

Yukio Otsu

Some Remarks on the Interaction of Case and Word Order in Turkish: Implications for Acquisition

Jaklin Kornfilt

What You See Isn't Always What You Get

Cecile McKee

THE V-2 DEBATE

Constraining the Child's Grammar: Local Wellformedness in the Development of Verb Movement in German and French

Jürgen Weissenborn

Underspecification, Functional Projections, and Parameter Setting

Viviane Deprez

In Defense of the Strong Continuity Account of the Acquisition of Verb-Second

John Whitman

III LEARNABILITY

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, But That's the Problem: The Role of Syntax in Vocabulary Acquisition

Lila Gleitman and Henry Gleitman

Syntactic Bootstrapping and the Acquisition of Noun Meanings: The Mass-Count Issue

Gennaro Chierchia

Mapping from the Initial State to the Final State: The Separation of Universal Principles and Language-Specific Principles

Suzanne Flynn and Gita Martohardjono

Author Index

Subject Index

Language Index

General Introduction Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives

The chapters in these two volumes reflect a new and exciting convergence between developments in linguistic theory and developments in the study of natural language acquisition.

This convergence has long been motivated by the linguistic theory of Universal Grammar (UG), a theory under which both (1) and (2) hold.

• (1) UG is "a general theory of linguistic structure that aims to discover the framework of principles and elements common to attainable human languages; this theory is now often called 'universal grammar' " (Chomsky, 1986, pp. 3-4).
• (2) "UG may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of this faculty as a 'language acquisition device' " (Chomsky, 1986, pp. 3-4)-

In spite of this fundamental motivation, however, scholarship directed to a convergence between linguistic theory and actual first language acquisition has, until recently, been limited to the work of only a few scholars and their students. After a brief period of intense interaction in the early 1960s (e.g., between Chomsky, Miller, Lenneberg, and Brown; see Fodor, Bever, & Garrett, 1974, for review), this scholarship was generally not central to work in linguistic theory or in any other field (e.g., developmental psychology).

There were several apparent reasons for this divergence. Linguists, lacking adequate methodology or theory for studying development, often tended to dismiss an endeavor that would require scholarship in the area of language acquisition. Concurrently, as linguistic theory developed (growing in both technical precision and complexity, changing more quickly as time went on), psychologists, often lacking adequate methodology or theory in the area of linguistics, tended to avoid more and more any study of first language acquisition that involved linguistic theory.

This situation could have resulted in a highly developed, highly technical, and precise formal linguistic theory, with little or no connection to the empirical facts of first language acquisition or to biological reality. This result would undermine the theory of UG as stated in (1) and (2). It did not occur, however.

The chapters in these volumes attest to this by demonstrating the closest interaction between the field of linguistic theory and the study of first language acquisition to date. The fact that the field has seen this resurgence of interaction (and now, arguably, a more articulated and precise interaction) between linguistic theory and actual study of first language acquisition may be one of the strongest arguments for the viability and promise of the UG paradigm articulated in (1) and (2).

There are two critical aspects of current research in the UG paradigm that, together, characterize the specific thrust of this collection of papers and the source of much of its current energy: (a) the deliberate cross-linguistic aspect, and (b) the confrontation of real development in first language acquisition.

The Cross-Linguistic Research Paradigm

The research that appears in this collection specifically pursues a cross-linguistic perspective in combination with its focus on convergence between linguistic theory and acquisition. This approach has long been insinuated by the UG paradigm but has only gradually come to the fore, and it provides a new strength to argumentation in this paradigm.

It is clear that a theory of UG must be mapped to a theory of specific languages. It must be able to account for cross-language variation as well as for language universals, a fact that closely links it to issues of first language acquisition. Chomsky (1986) has articulated this point:

• (3) It is important to bear in mind that the study of one language may provide crucial evidence concerning the structure of some other language, if we continue to accept the plausible assumption that the capacity to acquire language, the subject matter of UG, is common across the species. . . . A study of English is a study of the realization of the initial state S₀ under particular conditions. Therefore it embodies assumptions, which should be made explicit concerning S₀. But S₀ is a constant; therefore Japanese must be an instantiation of the same initial state under different conditions. Investigation of Japanese might show that the assumptions concerning S₀ derived from the study of English were incorrect; these assumptions might provide the wrong answers for Japanese, and after correcting them on this basis we might be led to modify the postulated grammar of English. Because evidence from Japanese can evidently bear on the correctness of a theory of S₀, it can have indirect—but very powerful—bearing on the choice of the grammar that attempts to characterize the I-language attained by a speaker of English, (pp. 37-38)

The chapters in these volumes take this cross-linguistic perspective one step further. In accordance with (3), a theory of UG requires cross-linguistic analyses. This is true whether one is pursuing the theory from the point of view of adult language, where UG characterizes a critical component of the internalized language (I-language) attained by a speaker, or from the point of view of language acquisition, where UG is viewed as a model of the initial state (S₀). Therefore, if the converging study of linguistic theory and first language acquisition can strengthen research in the UG paradigm, the combined cross-linguistic approach in both fields should provide the strongest paradigm possible. All of the chapters in these volumes apply this cross-linguistic approach.

Development

The research in these volumes reflects a remarkable shift in assumptions in the field, such that there is now a shared assumption that development in language acquisition is real. The premise now is that neither (4) nor (5) alone can be assumed to provide a su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Table of Contents for Volume 1
• General Introduction: Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives
• Introduction to Volume 2: Constraining Binding, Dependencies and Learnability: Principles or Parameters?
• I SYNTACTIC FOUNDATIONS: ANAPHORA AND BINDING
• II LEXICAL ANAPHORS AND PRONOUNS
• III 'PRO-DROP'
• IV WH- AND QUANTIFIER SCOPE
• V LEARNABILITY
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Language Index