What sort of innate structure is needed to "bootstrap" into syntax?
The paper starts from Pinker's theory of the acquisition of phrase structure; it shows that it is possible to drop all the assumptions about innate syntactic structure from this theory. These assumptions can be replaced by assumptions about the basic structure of semantic representation available at the outset of language acquisition, without penalizing the acquisition of basic phrase structure rules. Essentially, the role played by X-bar theory in Pinker's model would be played by the (presumably innate) structure of the language of thought in the revised parallel model. Bootstrapping and semantic assimilation theories are shown to be formally very similar, though making different primitive assumptions. In their primitives, semantic assimilation theories have the advantage that they can offer an account of the origin of syntactic categories instead of postulating them as primitive. Ways of improving on the semantic assimilation version of Pinker's theory are considered, including a way of deriving the NP-VP constituent division that appears to have a better fit than Pinker's to evidence on language variation.
Braine
M D
MD
Department of Psychology, New York University, NY 10003.
D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D007323:Instinct; D007804:Language Development; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics