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Learning a generative syntax from transparent syntactic atoms in the linguistic input*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2013

ANAT NINIO
ANAT NINIO*
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
*
Address for correspondence: Anat Ninio, Department of Psychology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91905, Israel. e-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

We examined parents' two-word utterances expressing core syntactic relations in order to test the hypothesis that they may enable children to derive the atoms of hierarchical syntax, namely, the asymmetrical Merge/Dependency relation between pairs of words, and, in addition, to identify variables serving generative syntactic rules. Using a large English-language parental corpus, we located all two-word utterances containing a verb and its subject, object, or indirect object. Analysis showed that parental two-word sentences contain transparent information on the binary dependency/merge relation responsible for syntactic connectivity. The syntactic atoms modelled in the two-word input contain natural variables for dependents, making generalization to other contexts an immediate possibility. In a second study, a large sample of children were found to use the same verbs in the great majority of their early sentences expressing the same core grammatical relations. The results support a learning model according to which children learn the basics of syntax from parental two-word sentences.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 6 , November 2014 , pp. 1249 - 1275
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[*]

Construction of the speech corpora and syntactic annotation were supported under Grant 200900206 to Anat Ninio by the Spencer Foundation. I am grateful to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, for having me as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Linguistics and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science between August 2011 and July 2012, and for making it possible for me to work on this manuscript in a nourishing environment. Thanks are due to Patricia Brooks, Jerome Bruner, Adele Goldberg, Uri Hershberg, Daniel Kahneman, Tamar Keren-Portnoy, Lorraine McCune, Shira Ninio, Michael Tomasello, and two anonymous reviewers for insightful and constructive comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

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