Nativism, Formal Learning Theory, and Universal Grammar

Alexander Clark and Shalom Lappin

LSA Summer Institute 2011, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado

July 7-August 1, 2011

Course Description

Determining the nature of the language faculty has always been one of the central problems in linguistic theory. Is this faculty a rich set of powerful domain specific constraints on language acquisition, or does it consist of weak initialization biases for domain general learning procedures? The key debates on this question turn on learnability considerations, where these are formulated as versions of the "argument from the poverty of the stimulus" (APS). This discussion continues to play a major role in shaping the field.

This course comprises a series of lectures that address this question from a variety of perspectives. We analyze the APS in its various forms, and we consider how it supports linguistic nativism. We focus on formal versions of the APS which derive their force from the computational hardness of the language learning task. We see how these arguments can be made more precise within both traditional and modern learning paradigms. In the second half of the course we pursue a constructive reply to the APS by offering solutions to the learnability challenges that it presents. We show how some of the ideas and methods of distributional learning (which have their origin in the work of structuralist linguists) provide the basis for developing provably correct procedures that learn complex, richly structured language classes. The course is based on our recent monograph

Alexander Clark and Shalom Lappin (2011), Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus, Wiley-Blackwell.