Authors
Clark, Alexander
Year
2015
Abstract
Reviews of learnability in linguistics focus on negative results, with the nativists stressing the negative results and the researchers of a more empiricist persuasion downplaying them. This chapter discusses the theory of learnability or grammatical inference, from a positive perspective. It focuses on the methodological issues involved in applying the tools of mathematical analysis to the empirical problem of language acquisition, and the various assumptions that one make, and by discussing the problems of grammatical inference. The real story of language acquisition – a decade-long interaction between a rapidly developing child and a community of adults – is far beyond what we can capture in a tractable mathematical model. The chapter reviews recent developments in the field based on the classic ideas of distributional learning. For weak semantic learning, the ease of the learning task depends on what precisely the form of the semantic representation is taken to be.