A critical study of the arguments for and against the hypothesis that human beings are born with an innate universal grammar, with some brief discussions of alternative theories.

published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This paper reports the findings from an interconnected set of experiments designed to assess children’s knowledge of the semantic interactions between negation and quantified NPs. Our main finding is that young children, unlike adults, systematically interpret these elements on the basis of their position in overt syntax. We argue that this observation can be derived from an interplay between f...

There are currently two theories about how children acquire a language. The first is generative grammar, according to which all human children innately possess a universal grammar, abstract enough to structure any language of the world. Acquisition then consists of two processes: (1) acquiring all the words, idioms, and quirky constructions of the particular language being learned (by ‘normal’ ...

The alignment problem for synchronous grammars in its unrestricted form, i.e. whether for a grammar and a string pair the grammar induces an alignment of the two strings, reduces to the universal recognition problem, but restrictions may be imposed on the alignment sought, e.g. alignments may be 1 : 1, island-free or sure-possible sorted. The complexities of 15 restricted alignment problems in ...

Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) is generally construed as a fully lexicalized formalism, where all grammars use one and the same universal set of rules, and crosslinguistic variation is isolated in the lexicon. In this paper, we show that the weak generative capacity of this ‘pure’ form of CCG is strictly smaller than that of CCG with grammar-specific rules, and of other mildly context-sen...

One of Greenberg’s claims concerning the appearance of numerals as modifiers concerns the order of the elements, suggesting that post-nominal numerals are “favored in indefinite and approximate constructions”. Examining a small but representative body of data from a variety of languages, and one of the common grammaticalisation targets of singular numerals, the indefinite article, we conclude t...