Children always go beyond the input: The Maximise Minimal Means perspective

Biberauer, Theresa

doi:10.1515/tl-2019-0013

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…The features themselves, however, are detected from the input, where features 'are postulated if they can be seen to regulate some form of systematic contrast' (Biberauer 2019a: 58), that is 'children are sensitive to systematic departures from Saussurian arbitrariness (arbitrary form-meaning mappings)' (Biberauer & Roberts 2015a: 8). The formal nature of a feature (rather than phonological or semantic), can be detected in at least four ways (Biberauer 2018b(Biberauer , 2019bcf. Wiltschko 2014), which all need further research.…”

Section: Looking Ahead: What Is Neededmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Featural Typology of Bantu Agreement

Wal

2022

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The Bantu languages are in some sense remarkably uniform (subject, verb, order (SVO) basic word order, noun classes, verbal morphology), but this extensive language family also show a wealth of morphosyntactic variation. Two core areas in which such variation is attested are subject and object agreement. The book explores the variation in Bantu subject and object marking on the basis of data from 75 Bantu languages, discovering striking patterns (the Relation between Asymmetry and Non-Doubling Object Marking (RANDOM), and the Asymmetry Wants Single Object Marking (AWSOM) correlation), and providing a novel syntactic analysis. This analysis takes into account not just phi agreement, but also nominal licensing and information structure. A Person feature, associated with animacy, definiteness, or givenness, is shown to be responsible for differential object agreement, while at the same time accounting for doubling vs. non-doubling object marking—a hybrid solution to an age-old debate in Bantu comparative morphosyntax. It is furthermore proposed that low functional heads can Case-license flexibly downwards or upwards, depending on the relative topicality of the two arguments involved. This accounts for the properties of symmetric object marking in ditransitives (for Appl), and subject inversion constructions (for v). By keeping Agree constant and systematically determining which featural parameters are responsible for the attested variation, the proposed analysis argues for an emergentist view of features and parameters (following Biberauer 2018, 2019), and against both Strong Uniformity and Strong Modularity.

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Section: Looking Ahead: What Is Neededmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Featural Typology of Bantu Agreement

Wal

2022

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“…acquirers' inherent tendency to Maximise Minimal Means by overgeneralizing across the intake, even in adult acquirers. [9] ▪The latest generative theory of creolization by Aboh & DeGraff [10] has so far concentrated on Factors 1 & 2, i.e. Universal Grammar, and Primary Linguistic Data.…”

Section: (Ii) Vietnamese Pidgin Frenchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergent systematicity in Tây Bồi (Vietnamese Pidgin French)

Mayeux

2020

Preprint

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Early pidgins have been traditionally characterized as ‘fluid, structureless, and probably macaronic’ (Bickerton 1999: 54). According to this view, this unstructured code is only systematized when it is acquired by children during creolization. Presented here is a preliminary generative analysis of data from Tây Bồi/Vietnamese Pidgin French (VPF), a now-extinct pidgin which existed during the French colonization of Vietnam (Schuchardt 1888; Stageberg 1956; Reinecke 1968; Philips 1975; Nguyễn 1979; Love 2000). VPF was never acquired as an L1 nor fully elaborated; it therefore did not creolize, remaining unambiguously at the pidgin stage. Data from the 19th and 20th centuries suggest that, contrary to the predictions of the Bickertonian pidgin-to-creole model, VPF already exhibited a degree of grammatical systematicity. This poster explores the hypothesis that emergent systematicity in VPF grammar can be attributed to adult acquirers' overgeneralizations across the intake (Maximise Minimal Means; Biberauer 2019).

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“…The Third-Factor Principle Approach (e.g. BIBERAUER, 2019a, ROBERTS, 2019 The first approach (1a) indicates that the linguistic variation comes from the lexicon; more specifically, the feature make-up of functional categories (cf. FUKUI, 1995).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A parameter-free underspecification approach to complementizer agreement

Sugimoto

Pires

2022

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O tema da variação linguística, correspondendo à variação paramétrica na sintaxe, não tem sido explorado de modo compreensivo na abordagem minimalista (veja-se, no entanto, ROBERTS, 2019 e as referência lá citadas). Duas visões centrais e parcialmente distintas da variação linguística nesse arcabouço são: (i) a variação se origina no léxico (a chamada conjectura Borer-Chomsky, cf. BAKER, 2008) e (ii) a variação reside na externalização (a conjectura Berwick-Chomsky). Neste artigo, exploramos uma terceira visão da variação linguística, invocando a subespecificação do ordenamento de regras na sintaxe estrita, baseada em Obata et al. (2015). Para implementar essa abordagem, comparamos duas línguas, o português brasileiro (PB) e o crioulo cabo-verdiano (CCV), quanto à concordância do complementador em perguntas-WH envolvendo argumento e adjunto. Enquanto o CCV exige a expressão do complementador nas perguntas-WH, o PB apresenta um padrão geral de opcionalidade nas perguntas-WH tanto de argumento quanto de adjunto. Defendemos que os dois sistemas podem ser explicados em termos de subespecificação do ordenamento de regras na gramática.

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Children always go beyond the input: The Maximise Minimal Means perspective

Cited by 17 publications

References 27 publications

A Featural Typology of Bantu Agreement

A Featural Typology of Bantu Agreement

Emergent systematicity in Tây Bồi (Vietnamese Pidgin French)

A parameter-free underspecification approach to complementizer agreement

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