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From: curry@hpl.hp.com (Bo Curry)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 19:41:31 GMT
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jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu wrote:
: curry@hpl.hp.com (Bo Curry) wrote:

: > Obviously,
: > there is considerable variation within the limits fixed
: > by the UG [. . .]

: Perhaps you could give an example of a limit fixed by the
: UG.

Some random gleanings from Pinker's "The Language Instinct":

1. For every human language, linguists are able to identify
constructs which play the roles of Subject, Object, and Verb.
This may seem trivial, but it's rather amazing when you think
about it. It is not true of artificial languages, e.g. Pascal.

2. Languages which depend on word order tend to keep Object
and Verb together. Most word-order languages are either SOV
(e.g. Japanese) or SVO (e.g. English), a few are VSO, and
the other three possible permutations are very rare or nonexistent.
(This is a statistical limit, not an absolute limit. It still
requires explanation.)

3. The large majority of SOV languages put question words at the
end of sentences, and form postpositional phrases. The large
majority of SVO languages put question words at the beginning,
and form prepositional phrases. It is not uncommon for
a language to shift from SOV to SVO (consider, in English,
archaic and poetic phrases like "til death do us part").
When a language does so, however, the question words and
prepositions shift in synchrony.
Note that this striking regularity, which obtains only across
different languages, cannot be learned by a child, but only
by a linguist.

4. No language forms questions by total inversion of word
order in a sentence (e.g. "Built Jack that house the this is").

5. If a language has both derivational suffixes and inflectional
suffixes, the derivational ones are *always* attached closer to
the stem than are the inflectional. This is also understood by
young children - when 5-year-olds were told that a creature which
eats a cow should be called a "cow-eater", they would posit
that a creature that eats lots of mice should be a "mice-eater".
However, a creature that eats lots of rats was always termed
a "rat-eater", never a "rats-eater". It seems unlikely that this
regularity was learned from any "stimulus".

6. It is grammatical in English to form a question from the inversion:

"I saw John with Mary." => "Who did you see John with?"

The similar construction with a conjunction,

"I saw John and Mary." => "Who did you see John and?"

is not grammatical in any language. Why not? It makes perfect sense.

etc. It's a good book.

Bo

