language learning and structural dependency

[Richard Hudson]

Thanks to Brian and Geoff for their nice summaries of these issues.
Personally I've never understand why structure-dependency has been taken so
seriously. It certainly seems (to me at least) to be a property of language
- but so far as I can see, it's a property of all cognition, so it proves
nothing about the genetic foundations of language. Can anyone give me an
example of an activity or a kind of thinking which isn't structure-dependent?
         Dick Hudson

At 18:29 23/06/2004, you wrote:
>Dear Funknet,
>
>   Thanks to Geoff Nathan for picking up the ball on Rob Freeman's
>question about the logical problem of language acquisition. Although
>Chomsky floated some ideas in "Syntactic Structures" and "Aspects" about
>language being unlearnable because of degenerate input, that idea was
>abandoned when Newport, Gleitman, and Gleitman showed that input to children
>was, if anything, even more grammatically well-formed than adult
>conversation.
>   Attention then turned to a particular version of "Plato's Problem" couched
>in terms of question formation in English, just as Geoff has noted. In the
>most publicized version of this discussion (from Piatelli-Palmarini,
>1970), Chomsky discussed the unacceptability of questions like
>
>Is the boy who __ standing in line is tall?
>
>as opposed to
>
>Is the boy who is standing in line tall?
>
>The ungrammaticality of these is said to hinge on the Structural Dependency
>condition.
>
>This issue is discussed in great and clarifying detail by Geoff Pullum and
>Barbara Scholz in a target article in The Linguistic Review 1o from 2002.
>The whole issue is devoted to commentary on the Pullum-Scholz analysis.
>
>I have also been working on this topic, hoping to use the CHILDES database
>as a way of testing Chomsky's claims empirically. The results of my
>analysis will be coming out in the next issue of The Journal of Child
>Language, along with 12 additional commentaries.
>
>It would not be easy to summarize all of these discussions here.  However,
>perhaps the most important outcome of my analysis, stimulated in many ways
>by the Pullum-Scholz analysis, is that there is good positive data
>available to the child for the learning of the Structural Dependency
>condition.
>
>In the end, I find myself agreeing with Chomsky on one basic point.  This
>is the fact that children have a basic capacity to associate words into
>conceptual clusters that then can be treated as "chunked" wholes.  This
>operation is enough to allow for the emergence of structure.  There is no
>reason to believe that this type of structural dependency is exclusively
>linguistic, but I think it is reasonable to imagine that the evolution of
>language allowed our species to develop this ability beyond that of our
>closest biological relatives.
>
>The particular examples that Geoff Nathan cites involve a somewhat
>different constraint on raising.  For this constraint, an account based
>not just on
>the availability of positive evidence, but also on the conservative nature
>of the learning of wh-question patterns seems more appropriate.  Data
>providing evidence for this conservatism this comes from:
>
>Kuczaj, S., & Brannick, N. (1979). Children's use of the Wh question modal
>auxiliary placement rule. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 28,
>43-67.
>
>--Brian MacWhinney


Dick (Richard) Hudson, FBA
Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
020 7679 3152; fax 020 7383 4108; www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm