The acquisition of linking theories: A Tolerance Principle approach to learning UTAH and rUTAH
Lisa Pearl, Jon Sprouse
January 2021
 

We investigate concrete acquisition theories for a derived approach to linking theory development, and explore to what extent two prominent linking theories in the syntactic literature – UTAH and rUTAH – can be derived from the data that English-learning children encounter. We leverage a conceptual acquisition framework that specifies key aspects of the child’s acquisition task, including realistic child-directed input and a cognitively-motivated mechanism for inference (the sufficiency threshold, derived from the Tolerance and Sufficiency Principles). We find that rUTAH can be derived while UTAH can’t, if children derive their linking theories from their input as specified here. We discuss the implications of these results for both acquisition theory and syntactic theory.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/004088
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: under review
keywords: linking problem, utah, rutah, argument from acquisition, tolerance principle, sufficiency principle, syntax
previous versions: v4 [May 2020]
v3 [July 2019]
v2 [February 2019]
v1 [June 2018]
Downloaded:1318 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]