Transcript History of the English Language

Theories of Language
Acquisition
Two theoretical approaches
• Learning theories
• Nativist theories
Jean Piaget 1896-1980
Noam Chomsky 1928
What is innate?
core
periphery
Innate universal grammar
How does the innate core look like?
• Grammatical categories with clear-cut
boundaries.
• Grammatical rules that are comparable to
the rules of arithmetic.
• The mind (i.e. the language faculty) as a
computer.
Steven Pinker (1984)
Grammatical categories are innate:
• nouns, verbs, adjectives
• subject, predicate, object
• NP, VP, S
How do children recognize nouns and
verbs in the ambient language?
• Morphosyntactic features: number, case, gender,
• Distribution: after articles and adjectives
• Meaning: denote objects, persons, animals
Semantic bootstrapping
Category
Meaning
Noun
Person, thing, animal
Verb
Processes, states
Adjective
Attribute
Preposition
Spatial relation, path, direction
Semantic bootstrapping
• Step 1: Children construct semantic word classes
based on words they encounter in the ambient
language.
• Step 2: Children ‘link’ the semantically specified word
classes to innate grammatical categories.
• Step 3. Once the semantic word classes are ‘hooked
up’ to the categories of innate universal grammar,
language-specific linguistic features (e.g. morphology,
distribution) can help to subsume semantically a-typical
members under a specific class.
Why does Pinker posit innate linguistic
categories?
• Infinite search domain
• Nature of linguistic categories:
(1) discrete
(2) highly abstract
Parameter setting
Parameters
• Pro-drop parameter
• Head-direction parameter
Greenberg’s word order correlations
VO-language
V O
P NP
OV-language
O V
NP P
AUX V
SUB S
ART N
N REL
V AUX
S SUB
N ART
REL N
V COMP
COMP V
The head-direction parameter
Greenberg’s word order correlations reflect the
ordering of head and dependent categories.
What’s a head?
• The semantically most salient element
• The category determinant
• The morphosyntactic locus
The head-direction parameter
Languages are either consistently head-initial
or consistently head-final, because these are
the two options provided by innate universal
grammar.
Processing explanations (Hawkins 1994)
[walked [across the street]]
[[street the across] walked]
[[walked [the street across]]
The innateness hypothesis
• Language is a unique ability of humans.
• Specific brain damages cause specific language
impairments (e.g. Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area)
• SLI children
• The Gopnik family: genetically transmitted language
deficit
• The critical period / wild children
• The universality of linguistic categories
• The speed of language acquisition
• The poverty of the stimulus
The argument from the poverty of the
stimulus
Chomsky: The linguistic input that children
receive is not sufficient to learn grammar from
experience alone.
Types of evidence
• Positive evidence
• Negative evidence
The argument from the poverty of the
stimulus
Chomsky: There is an enormous gap between
the complicated system of adult grammar and
‘the meager and degenerated input’ that
children receive.
Arguments against the argument from
the poverty of the stimulus
• The ambient language provides a very rich source of
distributional information (Redington et al. 1998; see
also Pullum and Scholz 2002).
• Relatively simple associative learning mechanisms
are sufficient to extract complicated grammatical
patterns from the ambient language (connectionism;
Rumelhart and McClelland 1986; Elman et al. 1996).
• Young children are extremely good ‘pattern finders’
(Saffran et al. 1996).
• Language acquisition is incremental: Preschool
children learn spoken language (Elman 1993).
• The nature of grammatical knowledge.
The no negative evidence problem
CHILD:
Mommy goed to bed.
CHILD:
Is Mommy is coming?
CHILD:
Mommy fell the bottle.
How do children eliminate their overgeneralization
mistakes?
The no negative evidence problem
Hypothesis: Parents correct their children.
Parents are much more likely to correct the content of
their children‘s speech than their grammatical errors.
Grammatical errors are only rarely corrected.
The no negative evidence problem
CHILD: Want other one spoon, Daddy.
Father: You mean, you want the other spoon.
CHILD: Yes, I want the other one spoon.
Father: Can you say ‚the other spoon‘?
CHILD: Other … one … spoon.
Father: Say ‚other‘.
CHILD: ‚Other‘.
Father: ‚Spoon‘.
CHILD: ‚Spoon‘
Father: ‚Other spoon‘.
CHILD: ‚Other spoon‘. …
CHILD: Now give me the other one spoon.
Indirect negative evidence
Parents do not explicitly correct their children‘s
grammatical errors, but it has been shown that
they are likely to repeat their child‘s incorrect
utterance (correctly).
CHILD:
Daddy putted on my hat on.
MOTHER:
Yes, daddy put your hat on.
Generative Grammar
Construction Grammar
Grammar consists of form-function pairings, i.e.
constructions.
A construction is a complex linguistic sign that
combines a specific form with a particular meaning.
Linguistic sign
r{bIt
Construction Grammar
• Constructions are linguistic signs.
• Constructions are more complex than words.
• Constructions are formally more abstract than words.
Passive Construction
(1)
The meal was cooked by John.
(2)
Mary was hit by the car.
(3)
The ball was kicked by Peter.
(4)
The book was written by John.
NP be V-ed
PA
verb
by NP
AG
Caused-motion Construction
(1)
She dragged the child into the car.
(2)
He wiped the mud off his shoes.
(3)
She forced the ball into the jar.
(4)
He pushed the book down the chute.
NP
V
NP
PP
<X causes Y to move somewhere>
(5)
She sneezed the napkin of the table.
Resultative Construction
(1)
Peter meeked the bleek dizzy.
NP
V
NP
ADJ
<X changes Y such Y becomes Z>
Transitive Grammar
(1)
Peter hit mary.
(2)
Peter kicked the horse.
(3)
Peter pressed the button.
(4)
Peter pushed the elephant.
NP
V
NP
<X affected Y>
Category structure
(1)
a.
b.
Peter kicked the ball.
Peter likes bananas
[activity]
(2)
a.
b.
Peter eat it up.
Peter is eating it.
[telic]
(3)
a.
b.
I write your name.
I forgot your name.
[volitional]
(4)
a.
b.
I kicked the ball.
I carried the ball.
[punctual]
(5)
a.
b.
I drank the beer.
I drank some beer.
[individual]
(6)
a.
b.
I kicked the ball.
I didn’t kick the ball.
[affirmative]
Construction grammar network
Meaning
Meaning
Form
Form
Meaning
Form
Meaning
Form
Meaning
Form