It is a well known fact about German that animacy plays a role in determining the word order of verbal arguments. In children’s production, animacy not only affects the order of the direct and indirect object in non-canonical double object constructions, but it also has an influence on the overt dative case marking of the indirect object. Optimality Theory readily accounts for these data in usi...

The outcome of scientific research depends on how a phenomenon is viewed and how the questions are phrased. This applies also to the nativist view of language acquisition. As a complement to MacWhinney’s discussion of nativism from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology, I would like to devote this commentary to the question of the title from the viewpoint of computational linguistics. Formally,...

We investigate a type of lossless source code called a grammar-based code, which, in response to any input data string over a fixed finite alphabet, selects a context-free grammar representing in the sense that is the unique string belonging to the language generated by . Lossless compression of takes place indirectly via compression of the production rules of the grammar . It is shown that, su...

A grammar transform is a transformation that converts any data sequence to be compressed into a grammar from which the original data sequence can be fully reconstructed. In a grammar-based code, a data sequence is first converted into a grammar by a grammar transform and then losslessly encoded. In this paper, a greedy grammar transform is first presented; this grammar transform constructs sequ...

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar requires marriage quantitative properties input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational is extended acquisition (L2A) explore verb-second word order optionality in L2 English. Patterns L1-German–L2-English are rev...

In this paper we propose a method to compositionally interpret the meanings of floated quantifiers on the basis of Categorial Grammar (Carpenter 1997) and Davidsonian semantics (Davidson 1980). In this approach, floated quantifiers are accounted for semantically as a kind of adverbial phrase so that we do not need any special syntactic operations, such as quantifier raising, in order to interpr...

ConTroll is a grammar development system which supports the implementation of current constraint-based theories. It uses strongly typed feature structures as its principal data structure and ooers deenite relations, universal constraints, and lexical rules to express grammar constraints. The aspects of ConTroll of relevance to the development of large grammars are discussed in detail. The syste...