This course addresses some basic questions about the nature of native speakers' knowledge of language. Among a number of other questions to be addressed throughout this course, the following two play a key role: (i) What do native speakers know when they know a language? and (ii) how do native speakers acquire this knowledge? The answers to be presented come from the proposals made by Noam Chomsky and his followers starting from the 1980s. According to these proposals, natural languages are composed of a finite set of "principles" that do not vary across languages and a finite set of "parameters", where each parameter has a limited number of possible values. The diversity of natural languages is explained by differences between their sets of parameter values. Children acquiring language discover which values characterize their native language and set their parameters accordingly. Once this conception of human language is introduced, we will focus on what specific answers this approach gives to the specific questions regarding natural languages, particularly in the domain of syntax. Study of natural language syntax under the 'Principles and Parameters theory' (and for that matter, under any other formal theory) matters for cognitive science because the aim of such theories is to formalize a piece of knowledge that is represented in the human mind and that this knowledge presumably shares key computational properties with other cognitive domains. Data sets from a diverse set of natural languages will be analyzed within the framework to be introduced in the course.
This course presents a very general introduction to the theory of ‘Principles and Parameters’ as proposed by Noam Chomsky and others in the early 1980s. A conception of child language acquisition will be introduced within this framework. Study of natural language syntax under the 'Principles and Parameters theory' (and for that matter, under any other formal theory) matters for cognitive science because the aim of such theories is to formalize a piece of knowledge that is represented in the human mind and that this knowledge presumably shares key computational properties with other cognitive domains.