Constraints Of Grammar Research Articles

The Layered Syntactic Structure of the Complementizer System: Functional Heads and Multiple Movements in the Early Left-Periphery. A Corpus Study on Italian.

In this paper we document the developmental trajectory of the complementizer system (CP-system) in Italian by looking at the earliest spontaneous production of eleven young children, whose transcriptions are available on CHILDES. We conducted a novel corpus analysis, tracking down a number of constructions in which the clausal left-periphery is activated. First, we considered the appearance of the different complementizer particles in the CP-system, which overtly realize the three distinct functional projections ForceP, IntP, and FinP. The analysis revealed that children acquiring Italian correctly use these complementizer particles already in the third year of life. Second, we looked for the simultaneous activation of different functional projections within the CP-system. We went through our corpus searching for complex sentences in which more than one constituent was moved to the left periphery. This option is allowed by the adult grammar of Italian and, as our search revealed, it is also attested in the grammar of young children. Soon after their second birthday, sequences in which a left-dislocated Topic and a Wh- element co-occur are attested, directly supporting the existence of a (high) Topic position above FocusP. Moreover, movement in general conforms to the constraints of the adult grammar, with no attested violation of obligatory inversion (a consequence of the Q-Criterion). Importantly, “why-questions” did not require inversion, much as in the adult grammar of Italian. Taken together, children's use of complementizer particles and their activation of multiple landing sites for movement show that 2-year-olds already possess a richly articulated functional structure of the CP-system, aligned to the layered adult structure. In concluding the paper, we also discuss some temporal differences between constructions activating high and low portions of the CP-system. In particular, we detect a temporal precedence for wh-questions over why-questions. Since the former activate a lower projection, this is consistent with the recently proposed Growing Trees hypothesis, according to which the development of the CP-system proceeds stepwise.

How does the faculty of language relate to rules, axioms, and constraints?

This paper explores the link between rules of grammar, grammar formalisms and the architecture of the language faculty. In doing so, it provides a flexible meta-level theory of the language faculty through the postulation of general axioms that govern the interaction of different components of grammar. The idea is simply that such an abstract formulation allows us to view the structure of the language faculty independently of specific theoretical frameworks/formalisms. It turns out that the system of rules, axioms and constraints of grammar cannot beexplicitlyrepresented in a general architecture of the language faculty — which circumvents the ontological mismatch of mental representations and formal/axiomatic properties of language. Rather, the system of rules, axioms, constraints of grammar isintentionallyprojected by humans, and this projection realizes/instantiates what Dascal (1992) calls ‘psychopragmatics’. Relevant implications for linguistic theory, learnability and (computational) models of language processing are also explored.

Crossover and mutation operators for grammar-guided genetic programming

This paper proposes a new grammar-guided genetic programming (GGGP) system by introducing two original genetic operators: crossover and mutation, which most influence the evolution process. The first, the so-called grammar-based crossover operator, strikes a good balance between search space exploration and exploitation capabilities and, therefore, enhances GGGP system performance. And the second is a grammar-based mutation operator, based on the crossover, which has been designed to generate individuals that match the syntactical constraints of the context-free grammar that defines the programs to be handled. The use of these operators together in the same GGGP system assures a higher convergence speed and less likelihood of getting trapped in local optima than other related approaches. These features are shown throughout the comparison of the results achieved by the proposed system with other important crossover and mutation methods in two experiments: a laboratory problem and the real-world task of breast cancer prognosis.

The nature of interlanguage: SLA of English reflexives

This article examines experimental data of SLA of English reflexives. A carefully designed experiment to tap syntactic constraints of interlanguage grammar and the consideration of the consistency of responses of individual subjects reveal the systematicity of interlanguage grammar much more explicitly than previous studies. Of subjects' behaviour, 95% perfectly matches the sanctions of parameter values suggested in Wexler and Manzini's (1987) Governing Category Parameter and Proper Antecedent Parameter. However, re-examined in the light of the alternative hypotheses in the Binding Theory since Wexler and Manzini (1987), interlanguage grammar may violate the sanctions of Universal Grammar (UG) parameters for the variaton of referential properties of anaphors. Taking into account of this new evidence, the author suggests: 1) SLA is systematic; 2) L2 learners' interpretations of English reflexives are attributed to their linguistic knowledge; and 3) UG is available in SLA, and SLA of the referential properties of English reflexives is carried out by (re)setting parameter values.

The grammar of thought

Abstract The ‘Grammar of thought’ addresses the problem of deductive inference from the standpoint of a cognitive process as well as from the standpoint of a formal model. I argue that the former consideration requires us to think of the form of propositions in close correspondence with the grammar of natural language. Thus, logical form must be the form of sentences of natural language and not the form of sentences of an artificial language. Modern logic has great inference power but fails as a model of actual inference. On the other hand, the older traditional logic, which was weak in inference power, did attempt to adhere to the constraints of natural grammar. The paper sketches a theory of logical structure designed to satisfy the two requirements of conformity to natural syntax and of inference power.

THE TIME IT TAKES TO NAME AN OBJECT.

WHEN an individual gives the name of an object presented to him, he is producing a word in conditions which require the processing of a greater quantity of information than when the same word is evoked in the course of a sentence, where the constraints of grammar, syntax and theme limit the ensemble of possible choices.