Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
How is knowledge of one's idiolect -- I(nternal)-language, in Noam Chomsky's (1986) terminology -- represented in the mind/brain? How is such knowledge acquired by children? Answers to these questions are intricately and constructively related. In the principles and parameters/minimalist approach (Chomsky 1981, 1986, 1995; see SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF and MINIMALISM), linguistic knowledge, in addition to a (language-specific) LEXICON (see WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF and COMPUTATIONAL LEXICONS), consists of a computational system that is subject to an innate set of formal constraints, partitioned into principles and parameters. The principles are argued to be universal; they formalize constraints obeyed by all languages (see LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS). Alongside these principles -- and perhaps within some of these principles (e.g., Rizzi 1982) -- what allows for diversity in TYPOLOGY (possibly, in addition to the lexicon proper) are the parameters. These parameters constitute an innate and finite set of "switches," each with a fixed range of settings. These switches give the learner a restricted number of options in determining the complete shape of the attained I-language. In such a framework, syntax acquisition reduces to fixing the values of parameters on the basis of primary linguistic data (PLD) (cf. LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Taken together, principles and parameters bring a solution to the "logical problem of language acquisition":
(1)
Per (1), language acquisition is the process in which exposure to PLD transforms our innately specified faculté de langage (from an initial state S0) into a language-specific grammar (at the final state Sf) by assigning values (settings) to an array of (initially unset) parameters (see Chomsky 1981, HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS, and INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE).
The schema just sketched delineates a fascinating and productive research program. Yet our understanding is still very incomplete as to how (which aspects of) the PLD "lead" the learner to adopt (what) settings for (what) parameters. What are the major questions raised by this program? In order to flesh out the structure in (1), generativists are advancing on three complementary theoretical fronts toward:
Current approaches to 1-3 still remain controversial and in need of refinements. Here I discuss one proposal with some promise regarding certain (diachronic and ontogenetic) developmental data. Rohrbacher (1994), following insights from works by, among others, Borer, Pollock, Platzack and Holmberg, Roberts, and Chomsky, proposes that "rich" verbal inflections constitute a trigger for verb displacement (V-raising) because such MORPHOLOGY is listed in the lexicon and inserted in the syntax outside of the verbal phrase (VP): as affixal heads, such verbal inflection induces the verb to raise outside VP via head movement in order for the verb stem to become bound with its affixes. Such verb raising is diagnosed by, for example, placement of the finite verb to the left of certain adverbs, as in French. In languages with "poor" verbal inflection, affixes (if any) generally do not behave as independent syntactic elements that induce V-raising; they are introduced post-syntactically in the morpho-phonological component. Such proposals for the morphology-syntax interface in parameter-setting are not unproblematic. Yet they make interesting predictions that can (in principle, if not always in practice) be tested against phenomena in language acquisition, creolization, and language change. In turn, research in these three areas has brought forward data and insights that may prove useful in elucidating parameter setting.
Starting with CREOLES, there has been much recent work by young creolists proceeding from the hunch that paths of creolization may provide much needed hints toward understanding: the mechanics of parameter-setting in acquisition and through language change; and whether parameter settings are hierarchically organized along a cline of (un)markedness (with unmarked settings being those that are attained with few or no triggers of the appropriate type). The hunch that creolization phenomena should shed light on parameter setting essentially goes back to Derek Bickerton's language bioprogram hypothesis. In Bickerton's hypothesis, creoles by and large manifest the sort of properties a language learner would attain in the absence of reliable PLD, for example, in the presence of the overly impoverished and unstable patterns that are typical of speakers in (early) pidgin/interlanguage stages. Thus creole settings tend to indicate values accessible with few or no triggers in the PLD. Why should this state of affairs hold?
For Bickerton, structural similarities across creoles arise as creole grammars tend to instantiate genetically specified default values of parameter settings due to: (1) the restricted nature of the PLD: the source of the PLD that gave rise to the creole is a pidgin that is itself the outcome of adult language acquisition under duress, that is, with restricted input in contact situations that are unfriendly toward the learner; thus, pidgin grammatical morphologies tend to be impoverished; (2) the privileged role of children in creole genesis: in acquiring their native language with pidgin PLD, such children appear to stabilize and expand inconsistent, unstable, and restricted patterns in their PLD.
Regarding the morphologies of contact languages, it was noted long ago (e.g., by Meillet 1919) that inflectional paradigms are singularly susceptible to the vagaries of language learning in contact situations. Thus, in a theory where parameter settings are derived from the properties of inflectional morphemes (cf. Borer 1983; see e.g., Rohrbacher 1994), the question arises as to what settings are attainable in an environment that causes attrition to the PLD's inflectional morphemes. Bickerton's proposal is that, in the absence of the relevant (morphological) triggers, certain parameters are assigned default settings by UG. Although various creole structures are inherited from the parent languages, contra Bickerton (see e.g., Chaudenson 1992; Lumsden 1999), Bickerton's intuition seems partly confirmed in certain domains of creole syntax, for example, for Haitian Creole, in the domains of nonverbal predication (sans verbal copulas; DeGraff 1992), and of verb and object-pronoun syntax (with adverb-verb-pronoun order; DeGraff 1994, 1997). These are among patterns that distinguish Haitian Creole both from its European ancestor (French) and from its West-African ancestors (e.g., Kwa). Much recent work in this vein (see further readings below) is preliminary and exploratory, but appears to hold promise toward understanding the mechanics of parameter-setting and of creole genesis.
Beyond creolization, Bickerton's proposal, once embedded in a parameter-setting framework, also has ramifications for the relationship between acquisition and language change. Given (1) and some implementation thereof, the language acquisition device with the appropriate parameter-setting algorithm is one locus of confluence for creolization and language-change data (cf. DeGraff 1999b; Lightfoot 1999). As language learners and field and historical linguists often experience (the learners more successfully than the linguists), "language data do not wear their grammars on their sleeves," and parameter values must be fixed anew each time an I-language is attained, that is, at each instantiation of (1). This is in keeping with Meillet's (1929: 74) and others' classic idea that the transmission of language is inherently discontinuous: the grammar of each speaker is an individual re-creation, based on limited evidence. Furthermore, parameter-setting takes the learner through parametric configurations distinct from the target grammar(s) (see e.g., the papers in Roeper and Williams 1987). One must also remark that PLD sets -- as uttered by the learner's various model speakers (caretakers, older peers, etc.) -- are themselves determined by parameter-setting arrays that, although overlapping, are in most cases (subtly) distinct from one another idiolect-wise. Thus, even in unexceptional instances of acquisition, target grammars, and the final grammars attained by the learners ineluctably diverge, if only along relatively few parameters. Yet such localized parametric shifts are noticeable via the innovative structural patterns they give rise to. In any case, it has been claimed (e.g., in DeGraff 1999b) that such innovation is of the same character as that found in creolization and in the early stages of language acquisition (modulo the degree of divergence); they all are rooted in (1), which is a modern rendering of Meillet's observation about the discontinuity of language transmission. As for the more radical nature of the changes observed in creolization, this stems from the unusual nature of the PLD.
Thus, it should not come as surprise that creolization patterns (e.g., in Haitian Creole's verbal syntax and morphology; see DeGraff 1997) present uncanny parallels with: (1) patterns in language acquisition, as with children who, in the initial stages of acquiring V-raising languages like French, (optionally) use noninflected unraised verbs in contexts where the target language requires inflected raised verbs (Pierce 1992); and (2) patterns in language change, as for example in the history of English where V-raising in Middle English gave way to V-in-situ in Modern English with a prior decrease in verbal inflections (Rohrbacher 1994; Vikner 1997; Roberts 1999; Lightfoot 1999).
Results of this sort would then confirm the view that morphology is one major source of syntactic variations and that functional categories and their associated morphemes are the locus for parameter-setting. In this view, the learner, unlike the linguist, need not consult actual "constructions" in order to set parameters. Instead, inflectional paradigms (once their "richness" and frequencies exceed certain thresholds) serve as triggers for syntax-related settings such as V-raising vs V-in-situ, possibly alongside syntactic triggers qua robust and localized distributional patterns (e.g., verb-negation/adverb orders; see, e.g., Roberts 1999; Lightfoot 1999). (As noted by Rohrbacher 1994: 274, the inflectional paradigms may be key because they must be learned anyway.) In absence of relatively copious morphological (and syntactic) triggers, the learner initially falls back on default options (e.g., V-in-situ) as in the earliest stages of acquisition and in the linguistic environments that produced Haitian Creole and Modern English -- and other languages that lost V-raising through language contact.
The hypothesis sketched above regarding parameter-setting (in verbal syntax) has been much debated; see, inter alios, Vikner 1997 for counterexamples, and Thráinsson 1996 and Lightfoot 1999 for alternative proposals. Yet, to advance our understanding of parameter-setting within current (provisional) assumptions in syntax (particularly minimalism), one may ask whether morphological triggering (or any other triggering that relies on narrowly defined, easily accessible paradigms) must be the null hypothesis in any theory that both assumes "constructions" to be epiphenomenal (see Chomsky 1995) and potentially ambiguous parameter- wise (e.g., Gibson and Wexler 1994), and seeks to solve the logical problem of language acquisition by keeping learning and induction from PLD to a strict minimum (see POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS ARGUMENTS).
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Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology