We develop an evaluation metric for Optimality Theory that allows a learner to induce a lexicon and a phonological grammar from unanalyzed surface forms. We wish to model aspects of knowledge such as the English-speaking child's knowledge that the aspiration of the first segment of k h aet is predictable and the French-speaking child's knowledge that the final l of table 'table' is optional and can be deleted while that of parle 'speak' cannot. We show that the learner we present succeeds in obtaining this kind of knowledge and is better equipped to do so than other existing learners in the literature.

Abstract

We explore the implications of a particular approach to learning for an architectural question in phonology. The learning approach follows the principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL), which has recently been used for learning in both constraint-based and rule-based phonology. The architectural question on which we focus is whether the grammar allows language-specific statements to be made at the level of the lexicon, as was assumed in early generative phonology, or whether such statements are prohibited, as is commonly assumed within more recent work. We show that under MDL, the architectural question has real empirical implications: across a range of seemingly natural representational schemes, an ability to make language-specific statements about the lexicon is needed to ensure the learnability of an important aspect of phonological knowledge.

Analyses of scope reconstruction typically fall into two competing approaches: ‘semanticreconstruction’, which derives non-surface scope using semantic mechanisms, and ‘syntacticreconstruction’, which derives it by positing additional syntactic representations at thelevel of Logical Form. Grosu and Krifka (2007) proposed a semantic-reconstruction analysisfor relative clauses like the gifted mathematician that Dan claims he is, in which the relativehead NP can be interpreted in the scope of a lower intensional quantifier. Their analysis relieson type-shifting the relative head into a predicate of functions. We develop an alternativeanalysis for such relative clauses that replaces type-shifting with syntactic reconstruction. Thecompeting analyses diverge in their predictions regarding scope possibilities in head-externalrelative clauses. We use Hebrew resumptive pronouns, which disambiguate a relative clausein favor of the head-external structure, to show that the prediction of syntactic reconstructionis correct. This result suggests that certain type-shifting operations are not made available byUniversal Grammar.Keywords: relative clauses, scope, reconstruction, type-shifting, de dicto, intensional quantifiers,binding, resumptive pronouns.

We evaluate the richness of the child’s input in semantics and its relation to the hypothesis space available to the child. Our case study is the acquisition of the universal quantifier every. We report two main findings regarding the acquisition of every on the basis of a corpus study of child-directed and child-ambient speech. Our first finding is that the input in semantics (as opposed to the input in syntax or phonology) is rich enough to systematically eliminate instances of the subset problem of language acquisition: overly general hypotheses about the meaning of every can violate pragmatic constraints, making such hypotheses incompatible with the child’s input. Our second finding is that the semantic input is too poor to eliminate instances of what we refer to as the superset problem, the mirror image of the subset problem. We argue that at least some overly specific hypotheses about the meaning of every are compatible with the child’s input, suggesting either that those hypotheses are not made available by UG or that non-trivial inductive biases are involved in children’s acquisition of every.