MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - Cryptome

820 Syntax, Acquisition of
there is only a small list of possible domains (Wexler and
Manzini 1982). Although Icelandic differs from English in
the details of the locality condition, it obeys the same containment
condition mentioned earlier, as do all languages.
As with the case of phrase types, what is universal in the
syntax of anaphors is considerable: the notion of anaphor,
the necessity of antecedents for anaphors, the containment
condition for anaphors, and the notion of locality condition.
Beyond this, we see a slim range of linguistic variation: the
identification of the domain of locality for anaphors. The
language learner has simply to identify the anaphors in her
language and identify the domain of locality in order for the
full behavior of anaphors to be determined.
The syntactic system interfaces with lexical knowledge
as well. The syntactic system of a language defines a set of
general sentence patterns for that language, but any given
lexical item will fit in only a subset of these. For example,
the English VP could be described as a pattern of the following
sort:
(15) V NP NP PP AP S AdvP
where only the head (V) is a necessary part of the phrase;
but different verbs will in general match only limited subpatterns
of this general pattern:
(16) a. think: [V S] “think that Bill was sick”
b. persuade: [V NP S] “persuade him that Bill was sick”
[V NP PP] “persuade him of my good
intentions”
These must be learned along with the verb’s meaning and
other properties (see WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF). It
is an open but much pursued question how much of the
syntactic parameterization of a language might be reducible
to aspects of lexical learning (see SYNTAX, ACQUISI-
TION OF). The principal obstacle to firm conclusions is that
the LEXICON, or the human lexical ability, is comparatively
less well understood than the syntactic system.
The most productive vein of research in syntax in recent
years has been the comparison of closely related languages.
The goal has been to discover the “minimum” differences
between languages, as it stands to reason that these will correlate
with the actual parameters of the syntactic system.
French and Italian are two closely related Romance languages
with a signal difference in how the subject of the
sentence is expressed. French, like English, requires a subject
for every clause; but Italian permits the omission of subjects
that are understood:
(17) a. Gianni credo che ha molto argento. (Italian)
b. *Jean pense que a beaucoup d’argent. (French)
c. Jean pense qu’il a beaucoup d’argent. (French)
d. John thinks that he has a lot of money. (English)
e. *John thinks that has a lot of money. (English)
By itself this difference between French and Italian
might be of little general interest, but in fact it appears to
correlate with other differences (Perlmutter 1978; Rizzi
1982). French is like English in blocking movement of the
subject of embedded clauses when the “complementizer”
that (que in French, che in Italian) is present, but Italian has
no such restriction:
(18) a. Chii credo che ti ha molto argento? (Italian)
b *Quii pense-tu que ti a beaucoup d’argent? (French)
c. *Who do you think that has a lot of money? (English)
And Italian permits its subject to appear in postposed postition,
after the verb, but French, like English, excludes this:
(19) a. Credo che ti ha molto argento Sergioi . (Italian)
b. *Je crois que ti a beaucoup d’argent (French)
Sergioi .
c. *I believe that ti has lots of money Sergioi . (English)
In all three cases, Italian differs from English in permitting
the trace of a moved or deleted subject in subject position
under various circumstances. As there are other language
pairs that differ in the same way, it is likely that these three
differences between French and Italian are related and that in
fact each is a manifestation of a single grammatical “parameter”
set differently for French and Italian, a parameter governing
the expression of the subject. Experiments in language
acquisition have confirmed this view (Hyams 1986).
The mapping of the syntactic parameters through
detailed study of language comparisons like the one just
mentioned has been the principal goal of research in syntax
in the 1980s and ’90s. The general theory of syntax has been
forced to become quite abstract in order to accommodate
the parameterizations in a straightforward way, but the compensation
has been a deeper understanding of what the
range of possible human syntactic systems looks like.
—Edwin Williams
References
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1981a). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht:
Foris.
Chomsky, N. (1981b). Principles and parameters of linguistic theory.
In N. Hornstein and D. Lightfoot, Eds., Explanations in
Linguistics. Longmans, pp. 123–146.
Crain, S. (1990). Language learning in the absence of experience.
Brain and Behavioral Science 14: 597–650.
Greenberg, J. (1963). Universals of Language. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Huang, J. (1982). Logical Relations in Chinese and the Theory of
Grammar. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Hyams, N. (1986). Language Acquisition and the Theory of
Parameters. Dordrecht: Reidel
Perlmutter, D. (1978). Impersonal passives and the unaccusative
hypothesis. In J. Jaeger et al., Eds., Proceedings of the Fourth
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1978: 157–
189.
Rizzi, L. (1982). Issues in Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Wexler, K., and R. Manzini. (1982). Parameters and learnability in
binding theory. In T. Roeper and E. Williams, Eds., Parameter
Setting. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 41–89.
Syntax, Acquisition of
Probably there are very few fields in cognitive science that
have shown as distinct a growth in the last decade as the