LING 355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Logical Consequence, Universal Grammar
Document Summary
Generativists and constructivists agree that there are several possible mechanisms to explain unlearning (though they may use different terminology) Indirect negative evidence via frequency (more common amongst constructivists) Generativists point out that there are errors that children never make, although these would be perfectly logical on the basis of analogy with other forms heard in the input. Such non-occurring errors are part of the motivation for universal grammar (ug), the idea being that children are (cid:494)programmed(cid:495) to know that languages can behave in certain ways but not in others. There are certain built-in principle that indicate to children that some aspects of grammar are not present in language. Certain principles are assumed to be built in as part of ug, such as the wh-island constraint and structure-dependency, which we considered earlier. Because of these built-in principles, children (cid:494)know(cid:495) that certain kinds of logically possible operations are not permitted in language.
