Diachronic and Synchronic Implications of Declension Shifts

Base Selection in Analogical Change in Yiddish

“…A hypothesis of this model is that learners must select a single surface form as the base or UR, even ifit does not preserve every single contrast. This is similar in spirit to a proposal by Lahiri and Dresher (1984), who suggested that learners pay more attention to nominatives when learning the morphological class of nouns; the current approach is an attempt to generalize this, and explain how learners might discover which forms to pay more attention to.…”

Language Learnability and L2 Phonology

“…Lahiri & Dresher (1984) make it clear that in terms of both synchronic and diachronic language development. If they are treating all input equally, we know it.…”

“…Lahiri and Dresher (1984) discuss some facts about analogical change (overgeneralization) in both synchronic and diachronic terms. Just as we cannot tell what children are paying attention to, neither can we be sure what forms are treated as the most important by the adult learners.…”

“…One of the differences between machine and human learning emerges when we compare the work of Dresher & Kaye (1990) with Lahiri & Dresher (1984); it concerns the notion of salient input. Could L2 learners be taught to be on the look-out for certain relevant cues which would give them the necessary information to reset their parameter?…”

Aditi Lahiri (ed.) (2000). Analogy, levelling, markedness: principles of change in phonology and morphology. (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 127.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. viii+385.

“…She has argued in the past (e.g. Lahiri 1982, Lahiri & Dresher 1983, and reiterates here, that language learners base their initial grammar on universally highly valued forms, regardless of the order in which the data is presented to them (p. 11). If these highly valued forms are the unmarked ones, then in constructing the initial grammar, the child is sensitive to markedness.…”