ABSTRACT

We investigate concrete acquisition theories for a derived approach to linking theory development and explore to what extent two prominent linking theories in the syntactic literature—UTAH and rUTAH—can be derived from the data that English-learning children encounter. We leverage a conceptual acquisition framework that specifies key aspects of the child’s acquisition task, including realistic child-directed input and a cognitively motivated mechanism for inference (the sufficiency threshold, derived from the Tolerance and Sufficiency Principles). We find that rUTAH can be derived but UTAH can’t, if children derive their linking theories from their input as specified here. We discuss the implications of these results for both syntactic theory and acquisition theory.

摘要

我们研究了具体的习得理论，以获得连接理论发展的派生方法，并探索句法文献中的两个突出的连接理论——UTAH 和 rUTAH——可以在多大程度上从英语学习儿童遇到的数据中推导出来。我们利用一个概念性习得框架，该框架规定了儿童习得任务的关键方面，包括现实的儿童导向输入和推理的认知动机机制（充分性阈值，源自容忍和充分性原则）。我们发现 rUTAH 可以推导出来，但 UTAH 不能推导出来，如果孩子们从这里指定的输入中推导出他们的链接理论。我们讨论了这些结果对句法理论和习得理论的影响。