Dr. Janet Dean Fodor

The Subset Principle: Friend or foe?

Friday, November 9th at 1:30 pm -3:30 pm
Room 1034, McIntyre Medical Building, 1200 av des Pins ouest

Dr. Janet Dean Fodor is a professor of Linguistics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York

Abstract

The Subset Principle (SP) is standardly regarded as essential for human language acquisition in the absence of negative data. However, SP can also be shown to impede attainment of the target grammar if learning is incremental (i.e., grammar decisions made on encounter with each sentence, no storage of past inputs), as in ‘triggering’. Without SP the danger is overgeneration errors, but with SP there are undergeneration errors. Our research group at CUNY is exploring several ways to tame this undesirable aspect of SP. I will present and compare two approaches. One is computational: the learning model is given some memory and additional computing power. The other approach is linguistic. We diagnose the root of the problem to be parametric ambiguity, and we cure it by providing specifications of unambiguous triggers. Though often taken for granted, implementing this turns out to be much more difficult than anticipated. Your advice and ideas will be very welcome.