Theories of Language

Learning:
Universal Grammar
Prof Ikbal Zeddari
Faculty of Letters and Humanities
Mohammed V University in Rabat
Aims of Linguistic theory
• "A theory of language must show how each particular language can
be derived from a uniform initial state under the boundary conditions'
set by experience.
• . . . The search for descriptive adequacy seems to lead to ever-greater
complexity and variety of rule systems, while the search for
explanatory adequacy requires that language structure must be
invariant, except at the margins."
• Chomsky, N. 2000: New horizons in the study of language and mind.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Aims of Linguistic theory:
• What constitutes knowledge of language?
• How is knowledge of language acquired?
• How is knowledge of language put to use?
• 'What are the physical mechanisms that serve as the material basis
for this system of knowledge and for the use of this knowledge?'
The UG approach
• Principles and parameters
• principles are unvarying and apply to all natural languages
• parameters possess a limited number of open values which characterize
differences between languages (parametric variation)
• Macroparameters
• The Minimalist Program
• The core of human language is the lexicon
• Lexical categories
• Functional categories
• Microparameters
The Logical Problem of Language
Acquisition
• The logical problem of language acquisition
• Degenerate input
• Lack of negative evidence
• Children go beyond the input
In SLA
• The same logical problem holds
• BUT They have an L1
• cognitively mature
• Different possible scenarios are open to consideration
• Second language grammars are constrained by Universal Grammar
The access question
• UG in L1 Acquisition
• a genetic blueprint which determines in advance the shape which
language will take
• In SLA
• Universal Grammar does not constrain second-language grammars or
Universal Grammar is impaired
• general learning mechanisms, giving rise to 'wild' grammars
• only the principles and parameters instantiated (activated) in the
learners' first language will be available, and that parameter resetting is
impossible.
Arguments for an innate language faculty in
children
• competence does not seem to be linked in any clear way to intelligence
• Language is one of the most complex and abstract pieces of knowledge children have to cope with at
such an early age

• John saw himself. •*

• * Himself saw John.
• Looking after himself bores John.
• John said that Fred liked himself.
• *John said that Fred liked himself.
• John told Bill to wash himself.
• *John told Bill to wash himself.
• John promised Bill to wash himself
• John believes himself to be intelligent,
• *John believes that himself is intelligent,
• John showed Bill a picture of himself
• Subjects with Williams' syndrome develop good command of language despite their
cognitive deficits
• Sophisticated use of language with complex syntax and adult-like vocabulary is found in
individuals whose overall mental development is otherwise very slow and remains below
that of a seven-year-old
• Smith and Tsimpli (1995) studied in detail the extraordinary case of a brain-damaged man
who can read and write and communicate in many languages but his nonverbal abilities
were impaired
• SLI (specific language impairment) Normal children may have linguistic deficit
• some aspects of language at least might be genetically controlled
• It could be an inherited disorder
• The gene FOXP2
• Its mutation apparently leads to specific language impairment (Lai et al., 2001).
Modularité
• within language itself, different modules also seem to be relatively
independent of one another.
• different areas are responsible for different aspect of language
• Broca's aphasia
• Wernicke' aphasia
Language as a biological behavior

• Language show characteristics of biological behavior in general

• 'The behaviour emerges before it is necessary'
• 'Its appearance is not the result of a conscious decision'.
• 'Its emergence is not triggered by external events (though the
surrounding environment must be sufficiently 'rich5 for it to develop
adequately)'
• 'Direct teaching and intensive practice have relatively little effect'
• 'There is a regular sequence of'milestones' as the behaviour develops
• 'There may be a "critical period" for the acquisition of the behaviour'
• See (Birdsong, 1999) for debate on the critical period in SLA
• Principles
• The first language learner's initial state is supposed to consist of a set
of universal principles.
• Parameters:
• parameters simply denote the finite range of biologically possible
linguistic forms.
• languages vary in limited ways, expressible in terms of parameters
that need to be fixed in one of a few possible settings.
• language learning is highly constrained in advance
One Principle: structure-
dependency
• language crucially depends on the structural relationships between
elements in a sentence (such as words, morphemes, etc.).
• Units in a sentence are grouped into larger phrases
• Syntactic operations are structure dependent.
• Subject aux inversion SAI
• We do not invert the first verb but the main verb of the clause
• In Passive voice, we move the whole noun phrase
Evidence for Parameters
• The evidence for parameters comes in two lines
• explain non-target grammatical patterns (see Hyams 1986, Crain & Pietroski
2002, Rizzi 2004, Roeper 2000 for recent efforts)
• the statistical correlates of parameters in child language acquisition
• null subjects in child English
• Comparative syntax: CROSSLINGUISTIC EXPLANATION
• Language acquisition: Their acquisition is sensitive to their instantiation in the
input
• Snyder’s work on Macroparameters illustrates both
• Snyder, W. (2001). On the nature of syntactic variation: Evidence from complex
predicates and complex word-formation. Language, 77, 324-342.
the triggering model of Gibson
& Wexler (1994)

• At any time, the learner is identified with a grammar G, i.e. a set of

parameter values
• a. Upon receiving an input sentence s, analyze (e.g., parse) s with G
• b. If success then do nothing; return to a.

• the syntactic categories used in language, both lexical and functional, also
form part of our Universal Grammar endowment, and do not have to be
learnt
•
Parameters in minimalism
• three potential sources of cross-linguistic variation relating to functional
categories
• Languages can differ as to which functional categories are realized in the
grammar
• Japanese lacks DP
• The features of a particular functional category can vary from language to
language.
• English lacks the gender feature
• Features are said to vary in strength: a feature can be strong in one language
and weak in another, with a range of syntactic consequences. For
• Infl [Inflection] features are strong in French and weak in English
THE LEXICAL PARAMETRIZATION
HYPOTHESIS
• the parameters are contained primarily in the functional categories
• The Lexicon
• Lexical categories
• Functional categories
• a closed class of items
• Infl Tense agreement complementizer dp
• Functional categories are hierachical in structure

• The computational system

• Move and merge
• STRUCTURE DEPENDENCY IS A PRINCIPLE A PART OF THE
COMPUTATIONAL SYSTEM
V TO I Movement

• * John kisses often Mary.

• b. Jean embrasse souvent Marie.
• c. John often kisses Mary.
• d. * Jean souvent embrasse Marie

• Parametric variation for a functional category, Inflection: tense, person, number,

gender
• Features associated with functional categories can be either weak or strong
• Infl in English is weak, whereas in French it is strong
• in languages like French, in which the features are strong, finite verbs have to move
to the I position for feature checking
The HEAD DIRECTION PARAMETER
• deals with the way in which phrases themselves are structured.
• English is a head-first language: the head of the phrase always
appears before its complements.
• Japanese is a head-last language: the complements precede the head
within the phrase.
• ENGLISH CHILDREN SET THIS PARAMETER AT AROUND 18 MONTHS
Children set the head direction parameter very early
Universal Grammar in SLA

• In what way is SLA different from FLA?

• the existence of the L1
• IS UG still operative?
• Full access
• Partial access
 The subset principle: the head
direction parameter
• Preverbal object pronouns
• English Learners of French
• L1 development stages reflect L1 stages
• Initial stage: learners leave object pronouns post verbally in the position occupied by
full noun phrases, e.g. L’homme a mange les, 'The dog has eaten them' (Zobl
1980;Clark 1985),
• 2nd stage: stage of omission of the pronoun: Le chien a mange before eventually
acquiring preverbal object pronouns: Le chien les a manges. (Towell and Hawkins,
1994, p. 69)
• French learners of English
• They find it easy to acquire the word order because English is the superset language
and French is a subset language as far as the head direction parameter is concerned.
Strong and weak inflection

• French learners of English have to reset the Infl parameter to [-strong], and
English learners of French have to reset it to [+strong]
• Yuan (2001) studied the acquisition of Chinese (weak I) by French (strong I)
and English (weak I) learners.
• All participants realized the ungrammaticality of verb-raising in Chinese
• Another study by White (1992), however, found somewhat different results.
• She studied the acquisition of verb-raising in questions, negatives and
adverb placement, in French learners of English as a second language.
• No problem with questions and negatives
• Not for adverbs. Linda takes always the metro
Hypotheses about parameter resetting

• The continuity hypothesis: functional categories are available from the start but are not in
evidence because of external factors
• The maturation hypothesis: they mature over time, that is, come 'on line' at specific ages
children 'build their grammar gradually as they learn the lexicon of their language and
project the relevant structure
(structure-building' approach)

• Some argued that functional categories are also absent in the very early stages of adult
second language acquisition (Vainikka and Young-Scholten, 1996a, 1996b, 1998
• functional categories are indeed present in the early stages in child second language
(Lakshmanan, 1993; Lakshmanan and Selinker, 1994; Grondin and White, 1996)
• Functional categories are also present in adult second language (Schwartz and Eubank,
1996; Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996; Schwartz, 1998)
The big picture

• Learners do not seem to produce 'wild' grammars principle may be

available
• Learners produce grammars that are not necessarily like either their
first language or their second language parameter setting may be
available
• Why some principle are problematic while others are not?
• Various approaches have different views on
• the Initial State
• the role of the first language
• the possibility of parameter resetting
• the Steady State (the final stable state)
• the role of non-Universal Grammar constrained mechanisms.
• Hypothesis 1: no access to Universal Grammar
• Critical period
• Meisel (1997, p. 258) concludes, 'I would like to hypothesize that
second language learners, rather than using structure dependent
operations constrained by UG, resort to linear sequencing strategies
which apply to surface strings'.
Hypothesis 2: full access to Universal Grammar

• Full access/no transfer:

• Flynn (1996) head direction
• Thomas (1991), the acquisition of reflexive bindings
• White et al (1992), wh-movement as well.
Full transfer/full access:

• This model also believes that second language learners have full access to
Universal Grammar principles and parameters whether or not they are
present in the learners' first language (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1994, 1996).

• learners are thought to transfer all the parameter-settings from their first
language in an initial stage
• They revise their hypotheses when the second language fails to conform to
these first language settings
• Universal Grammar is accessed via the first language in a first stage, and
directly thereafter when the second language input cannot be
accommodated within the first language settings
Full access/impaired early
representations:
• Several researchers also believe that learners can reset parameters to
the second language values, but that initially, learners are lacking
functional categories altogether. The Minimal Trees approach
(Vainikka andYoung-Scholten, 1996b, 1998)
• Functional categories develop later, but are not transferred from the
first language
Hypothesis 3: Partial access The Fundamental
Difference Hypothesis

• No parameter resetting:
• Bley vroman’s fundamental difference hypothesis
• Learners only have access to Universal (grammar via their first language.
• general problem-solving strategies are also at work
• Schachter is also a supporter of the indirect access hypothesis
• SUBJACENCY IS NOT ACQUIRED BY KOREAN LEARNERS OF English because korean
lacks this principle
• The noncontinuity hypothesis: She calls this critical period a Window of
Opportunity
• different Windows for different modules of the target language (Schachter, 1996,
p. 188).
The acquisition of reflexives

• In Lee's study, the Korean learners of English were of different ages;

the youngest and oldest subjects had not acquired the English setting
for the GC parameter, while the older children had apparently
succeeded in doing so. Schachter (1996, p. 187) concludes that these
findings show the Window of Opportunity not yet operative for the
youngest learners, but available to the older children.
Impaired functional features:

• second language grammars are Universal Grammar-constrained, but

that not all parameter settings will be available to learners
• accommodate the second language grammar within the settings they
already have
• Modulated structure building hypothesis (Hawkins, 2001) : learners
start with 'minimal trees' (as described above), that is, lexical
projections determined by the first language
• first language functional features transferring on to the second
language
Constructionism
• 'proposes that the L2er uses a coalition of resources
• - a UG template (including, for example, a limited set of parameters, a
small inventory of null anaphora, universal principles),
• first-language transfer
• primary linguistic data
• its mediation in social discourse (input and intake)
• instructional bootstrapping - to construct the L2 vocabulary and
grammar' (Herschensohn, 2000, p. 220).