1 Background Modern grammatical research,1 at least in the realms of morphosyntax, includes a number of largely nonoverlapping communities that have surprisingly little to do with one another. One – the Universal Grammar (UG) camp – is mainly concerned with a particular view of human languages as instantiations of a single grammar that is fixed in its general shape. UG researchers put forth hig...

Language is always in flux. Over time new patterns can be observed that are either minor modifications to the linguistic system, as when the meaning of a lexical item changes, or major ones, as when word order changes occur. That language change occurs primarily as a result of acquisition is uncontroversial. There are, however, very different theories and discourses about how to interpret this ...

Sociolinguistics and language contact studies have been since the work of Labov and Bickerton, to name just two major theoretical figures in the two fields, in search for adequate theoretical models. Due to the dominance of Chomskian linguistics in the 70s and 80s both made compromises with the logical machinery underlying Chomsky’s proposals: Labov designed since 1969 grammars with variable ru...

Many generalizations are impossible to learn via primary linguistic data, so they are assumed to be part of our genetic endowment. Generativists have tried to reduce Universal Grammar (UG) to a minimum, in particular by appealing to computational efficiency. In principle, this is an important improvement. The bottom line, however, is how well this computational approach explains the data. Unfor...

Any mechanism of language acquisition can only learn a restricted set of grammars. The human brain contains a mechanism for language acquisition which can learn a restricted set of grammars. The theory of this restricted set is universal grammar (UG). UG has to be sufficiently specific to induce linguistic coherence in a population. This phenomenon is known as "coherence threshold". Previously,...

The investigation and discussion of metalinguistic ability requires a firm theoretical foundation if it is to contribute to a proper account of its role in L1 and L2 performance. A framework for elaborating more rigorous accounts of this and other major issues of language acquisition and performance will be presented here as a prerequisite to discussing the role of metalinguistic knowledge. In ...

I completely agree with Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (AP&L) that anyone proposing a learning-strategy component needs to demonstrate precisely how that component helps solve the language acquisition task. To this end, I discuss how computational modeling is a tool well suited to doing exactly this, and that it has the added benefit of highlighting hidden assumptions underlying learning strategies...

A variety of experiments support the existence of “sonority projection”: speakers represent severe sonority sequencing violations ([lba]) as less wellformed than modest ones ([bda]), even though neither is present in their native language. One interpretation of such findings is that the Sonority Sequencing Principle ([9]) is part of Universal Grammar. Modeling study, however, suggests that the ...

Comparative correlative constructions (the more you run, the more you sweat) are widespread across the languages of the world (Taylor, 2006). Nonetheless, the peculiarities of this construction raise questions that challenge our understanding of the syntax of this specific construction and, more broadly, of how the core and the periphery of Universal Grammar (UG) are organized (Culicover and Ja...