Learning Unbounded Stress Systems via Local Inference

Explaining how children infer grammatical rules based on their limited finite experience is central to the hypothesis of universal grammar—that collection of inductive principles which allows learning to happen. Because children and languages are complex and many factors influence acquisition—physiological, sociolinguistic, articulatory, perceptual, phonological, syntactic, semantic—a simpler question is often asked: How could anything learn some aspect of language? In this paper, the aspect under investigation is the unbounded stress rules found in the world’s languages (described in §1.3). It is useful, however, to factor the problem even further: What contribution can a particular inductive principle—here a particular notion of locality—make to learning such stress rules?