NEGATIVE KNOWLEDGE FROM POSITIVE EVIDENCE CharlesYang

Why can't we say the asleep cat? There is a class of adjectives in English, all of which start with a schwa (e.g. afraid, alone, asleep, away, etc.), that cannot be used attributively in a prenominal position. A frequently invoked strategy for the acquisition of such negative constraints in language is to use indirect negative evidence. For instance, if the learner consistently observes paraphrases such as the cat that is asleep, then the conspicuous absence of the asleep cat may be a clue for its ungrammaticality (Boyd & Goldberg 2011). This article provides formal and quantitative evidence from child-directed English data to show that such learning strategies are untenable. However , the child can rely on positive data to establish the distributional similarities between this apparently idiosyncratic class of adjectives and locative particles (e.g. here, over, out, etc.) and prepositional phrases. With the use of an independently motivated principle of generalization (Yang 2005), the ungrammaticality of attributive usage can be effectively extended to the adjectives in question.* 1. Introduction. A theory of language and language acquisition should provide a broad account of the speaker's linguistic competence. It must explain the expressions that the speaker can produce as well as the absence of expressions that the speaker has not and in fact cannot produce because they are prohibited by universal or language-specific constraints. The negative aspect of language, or what not to say, has long been recognized as a central problem in the study of language acquisition. The most prominent discussion centers on what is known as baker's paradox (Baker 1979): How do children delin-eate the possible from the impossible based only on positive linguistic examples? Consider the two dative constructions in 1a. (1) a. *John told Bill the story. *John told the story to Bill. b. *John donated the painting to the museum. *John donated the museum the painting. How do children know that the double object construction is ungrammatical for verbs like donate (1b), even though they encounter plenty of positive instances of inter-changeability between the two dative constructions, as in 1a? The absence of negative evidence to children (Brown & Hanlon 1970, Braine 1971, Bowerman 1988, Marcus 1993) means that they cannot rely on direct feedback. At the same time, they cannot assume unattested linguistic forms to be ungrammatical in general, for that would rule out the productive and infinite use of language. The problem of learning negative …