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But Do We Need Universal Grammar? Comment On Lidz Et Al. (2003) Adele E.Goldberg

The document summarizes an experiment by Lidz et al. (2003) on children's understanding of causative verbs in Kannada. It found that children relied more on the number of nouns expressed than on causative morphology to interpret sentences. This supports a universalist position that children are biased towards an isomorphic mapping between nouns and semantic roles, following principles of Universal Grammar. However, the author argues this can also be explained by general pragmatic principles without appealing to innate linguistic knowledge.

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44 views6 pages

But Do We Need Universal Grammar? Comment On Lidz Et Al. (2003) Adele E.Goldberg

The document summarizes an experiment by Lidz et al. (2003) on children's understanding of causative verbs in Kannada. It found that children relied more on the number of nouns expressed than on causative morphology to interpret sentences. This supports a universalist position that children are biased towards an isomorphic mapping between nouns and semantic roles, following principles of Universal Grammar. However, the author argues this can also be explained by general pragmatic principles without appealing to innate linguistic knowledge.

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shankara_barani
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But do we need Universal Grammar?

Comment
on Lidz et al. (2003)
Adele E.Goldberg

Schools of thoughts in linguistics


TXGC6301
DR. Rodney C. Jubilado
By : Talal barghouthi
TGC080005
Summary
• The author of this article firstly summarized the work of Lidz et al 2003
• Lidz et al. (2003) performed an experiment involving the Dravidian language,
• Kannada, based on the methodology of Naigles, Gleitman, and Gleitman (1993).
• They presented to children (mean age 3;6) familiar verbs in familiar and unfamiliar
(ungrammatical) contexts. Unfamiliar contexts included intransitive verbs
presented in transitive frames and/or with causative morphology, and transitive
verbs presented in intransitive frames with or without causative morphology.
Children were then encouraged
• to act out a scene corresponding to the sentence they had heard using a set of toy
animals. Of particular interest is the degree to which the children, when faced with
an intransitive verb in an ungrammatical context, relied on causative morphology
as compared with the transitive syntax in their interpretations. The authors
observe that in Kannada, the causative morpheme is reliably associated with a
causative interpretation. They further note that the transitive construction
involving the overt expression of two arguments is associated with a wider range of
interpretations than causative (as is also the case in English—cf. transitive clauses
with the verbs know, see, want, owe). They suggest that any “emergentist” theory
that claims that argument structure is learned from the input, would predict that
subjects should rely more on the causative morpheme as a predictor of a causative
interpretation than the number of semantic participants expressed.
• They suggest that the “universalist” position on the other hand, predicts
that the appearance
• of two linguistically expressed participants should better predict a
causative interpretation.
• For this, they invoke the “theta criterion” (Chomsky, 1981) or what we
will refer to more
• transparently as the Isomorphic Mapping Hypothesis: “noun phrase
number lines up as
• simply as possible with argument number” (Lidz et al., 2003: 154). They
suggest that the
• Isomorphic Mapping Hypothesis is an aspect of “universal grammar”: i.e.
part of a set of
• hard-wired principles that are specific to language and are not the result
of empirical
• experience. Lidz et al. found that subjects rely on the number of
linguistically expressed
• noun phrases (NPs) to a much greater extent than they rely on the
causative morpheme,
• concluding that the evidence supports their universalist position.
Analysis
• As explained below, we fully agree that learners can be expected to pay
attention to the number of nouns expressed as an indication of the
propositional meaning being conveyed (see also Fisher, 1996, 2000). It is
necessary to question, however, an interpretation of the facts that relies
on an innate “universal grammar,” specific to language.
• Note first that the Isomorphic Mapping Hypothesis is far from
being universally valid as a generalization about the surface
structure that is available to children. For example, it is
systematically violated in many particular constructions within
English where the number of linguistically expressed
participants (“complements”) differs from the number of
number of central semantic participants (“arguments”) in the
scene. Example in short passive pat was killed.
• A more robust generalization is a weaker, pragmatic generalization: that the referents
of
• linguistically expressed NPs are assumed to be directly relevant to the semantic
• interpretation conveyed. This generalization follows from Gricean pragmatic
principles.
• Grice observed that human interactions generally, not just those that are specifically
• linguistic, are governed by a cooperative principle: one is assumed to make his/her
• contribution sufficient but not excessive, at the stage at which it occurs, by the
accepted
• purpose or direction of the exchange in which s/he is engaged. For example, if I am in
the
• middle of building a treehouse and I point to a hammer out of my reach, I do not
expect
• you to hand me a screwdriver; I also do not expect you to run away, to throw nails at
me, to
• begin to eat a kumquat, or to hand me a dozen hammers, assuming we are engaged
in a
• communicative exchange. I expect you to recognize that my pointing gesture is
• directly relevant to the information I am trying to convey, and I expect you to hand
me a
• single hammer
• Constructionist theories set out to account for all of our
knowledge of language as patterns of form and function.
That is, the constructionist approach does not assume
that language should be divided up into ‘core’ grammar
and the to-be-ignored ‘periphery.’ In identifying
constructions, an emphasis is placed on subtle aspects of
construal and on surface form. Cross-linguistic
generalizations are explained by appeal to general
cognitive constraints together with the functions of the
constructions involved. Language-specific generalizations
across constructions are captured via inheritance
networks. The inventory of constructions, which includes
morphemes or words, idioms, partially lexically filled and
fully abstract phrasal patterns, is understood to be
learned on the basis of the input together with general
cognitive mechanisms

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