Can one dispense with grammatical categories and formal hierarchies and rules in natural syntax acquisition?

By Jean-Adolphe Rondal
English

There are several reasons for dispensing with grammatical categories and formal hierarchies and rules in explaining the acquisition of natural syntax. Assuming that syntax is acquired through implicit procedural learning, one needs to specify what is actually learned. According to work on the implicit learning of artificial grammars, early syntactic development may be conceived as corresponding to mental representations of sequences of adjacent words extracted from language input. In this article, we propose that meaning relations between words supply the basis for a mechanism that reduces these sequences to a set of productive semantic-syntactical constructions. Meaning relations provide the representational net from which nonadjacent units in utterances can be dealt with. They may also facilitate the management of discontinuous propositional constituents, alleviating the need for formal hierarchical structures.

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