Towards Plausibility in Theories of Language Acquisition

Abstract

A number of recent articles (e.g. Braine 1971, Baker 1979) have taken up the question of how a child can learn a language without reliance on large amounts of negative grammaticality data, i.e. data of the form ‘X is not grammatical as a sentence of language L’. The authors note that the most obvious source of negative grammaticality data, namely corrections of the child’s speech by adults and older children, in fact plays only a small role in language acquisition. Baker also notes that in the case of the most commonly attested corrections, namely those relating to morphological irregularities (“Don’t say dood, say did”), the positive aspect of the correction provides all the data that the child needs: since specific rules (as Panini, Kiparsky, and Koutsoudas et al. tell us) take precedence over general rules, when the child learns that the past tense of do is did, he will automatically stop saying dood regardless of whether he ever learned that dood is unacceptable. The child is thus in an important respect not a little linguist: negative data provide much of the factual basis for argumentation by big linguists, but little of the data that the child has available for use in learning a grammar.