A Brief Introduction

Abstract

Abstract This book is dedicated to a single, foundational issue in the study of child language acquisition: What exactly is the child acquiring? Even the most ardent of nativists will acknowledge that languages differ from one another, and that the child uses her input to choose among the various grammars permitted by human biology. What exactly are the decisions that the child has to make? At the other end of the spectrum, those with an empiricist inclination expect the process of language acquisition to depend much more heavily on the input. Yet, these researchers too acknowledge that the final state of language acquisition includes grammatical knowledge of a general nature, more abstract than the specific examples encountered in the input. Again, what form does this grammatical knowledge take? The parametric approach to child language is a broad research program dedicated to this issue. Here the word parametric is a convenient cover term for any kind of abstract grammatical knowledge, regardless of how it is implemented: Possible instantiations include actual parameter settings, constraint rankings, or abstract features of functional heads, to name but a few My central empirical claim will be that the time course of child language acquisition is itself a rich source of evidence about the nature of what the child is acquiring. First, theories of grammatical variation across languages make strong, testable predictions about the process of language acquisition in children. This book will show, in considerable detail, how to derive these predictions and then test them with various types of evidence from children. Second, certain broad observations about the process of language acquisition, in and of themselves, have direct implications for the nature of what the child is acquiring. I will elaborate on this point in the final chapter of the book. My objective in writing the book is to create a resource for fellow child-language researchers who are interested in parametric questions.