Parameters in Language Acquisition
نویسنده
چکیده
knowledge of marble bag composition has been triggered by many individual examples of marble bags. More interestingly, this learner was able to have certain expectations about a marble bag containing a novel marble color by learning from bags containing only black or white marbles. Translating this to a linguistic example, suppose the marble bags are individual sentences. Some sentences contain verbs and objects, and whenever there is an object, suppose it appears after the verb (e.g., see the penguin, rather than the penguin see). Other sentences contain modal verbs and nonfinite main verbs, and whenever both occur, the modal precedes the main verb (e.g., could see, rather than see could). A learner could be aware of the shared structure of these sentences – specifically that these observable forms can be characterized as the head of a phrase appearing before its complements (specifically [VP V NP] and [IP Aux VP]) – and could encode this “head–first” knowledge at the level that describes sentences in general, akin to a hierarchical Bayesian learner’s overhypothesis. This learner would then infer that sentences in the language generally have head–first structure. If this learner then saw a sentence with a preposition surrounded by NPs (e.g. penguins on icebergs are adorable), it would infer that the preposition should precede its object ([NP penguins [PP on icebergs]] and not [NP [PP penguins on] icebergs]), even if it had never seen a preposition used before with an object. In this way, the notion of a head–directionality parameter (discussed further in section 3) can be encoded in a hierarchical learner. More
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