What lexical acquisition has to say about a non-lexicalist architecture of grammar – and vice-versa

Authors

Abstract

Distributed Morphology (DM) predicts that the units of syntactic derivation are smaller than words. This paper explores the implications of this prediction for language acquisition research and questions if DM is descriptively and theoretically sound when faced with acquisition phenomena. We first introduce independent evidence supporting sub-word units in acquisition: results from a computational model of lexical acquisition show that slightly more morphologically complex input data, such as Brazilian Portuguese when compared to English, cause a substantial decrease in the model’s performance; children’s early productions when acquiring polysynthetic languages reveal they are attempting to find these languages’ morphological units, instead of relying on chunks of non-analysed material; and words are shown to lack explanatory power in describing language acquisition in terms of storage, bootstrapping, or production. We then bridge the gap between DM and earlier proposals for the identification of words and formal features, briefly outlining a strategy for acquiring morphemes. Finally, we present accounts for two prevalent phenomena linked to language acquisition through the lens of DM: the overregularisation in acquiring irregular verbs, a step observed in children acquiring different languages; and the Brazilian Portuguese verbal paradigm shift, an example of morphological diachronic change. Our findings support the non-lexicalist derivation of words, highlighting that words are incompatible with acquisition from multiple perspectives. This suggests that understanding language acquisition benefits from considering the smaller, morpheme-based units predicted by Distributed Morphology.

Keywords

lexical acquisition, Distributed Morphology, overregularisation, diachronic change

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2012. Building words. In Aikhenvald, The languages of the Amazon. Oxford University Press.

Albuquerque, Hertha, Bezerra, Gitanna, & José Ferrari-Neto. 2012. Percepção infantil da morfologia derivacional: Um estudo experimental sobre segmentação de morfemas em português brasileiro. Signo y Seña 22, 119–138.

Alcântara, Cíntia da Costa. 2003. As classes formais do português e sua constituição: um estudo à luz da teoria da morfologia distribuída. Ph.D. thesis, Porto Alegre: Pontíficia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul.

Alcântara, Cíntia da Costa. 2010. As classes formais do português brasileiro. Letras de Hoje 45(1): 5–15.

Allen, Shanley. 2017. Polysynthesis in the acquisition of Inuit languages. In M. Fortescue, M. Mithun, & N. Evans (eds.), The Oxford handbook of polysynthesis, 449–472. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199683208.013.25

Andersen, Henning. 2017. Abduction. In A. Ledgeway and I. G. Roberts (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of historical syntax, 301–321. Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Andersen, Henning. 1973. Abductive and deductive change. Language 49(4): 765–793.

Araújo-Adriano, Paulo Ângelo, & Rafael Luis Beraldo. 2023. Implementing the U-shaped curve in Distributed Morphology and as a by-product of the Third Factor. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 22(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/jpl.8961

Atkinson, Martin. 1997. Learnability. In P. Fletcher & M. Garman (eds.), Language acquisition: Studies in first language development, 2nd ed., 90–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bacheschi, Celso. 2006. Os valores expressivos dos afixos na norma urbana culta de São Paulo. Master’s dissertation, São Paulo: Pontifícia Universidade Católica.

Bagetti, Tatiana, & Letícia Sicuro Corrêa. 2010. The early recognition of verb affixes: Evidence from Portuguese. On-Line Proceedings of the 35th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. 35th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston.

Bassani, Indaiá de Santana, & Marcus Vinicius Lunguinho. 2011. Revisitando a flexão verbal do português à luz da Morfologia Distribuída: Um estudo do presente, pretérito imperfeito e pretérito perfeito do indicativo. Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem 5(9): 199–227.

Beraldo, Rafael Luis. 2020. Computational models of lexical acquisition: Surveying the state of the art. Master’s dissertation, Campinas: Universidade Estadual de Campinas. https://repositorio.unicamp.br/acervo/detalhe/1129285

Berwick, Robert C. 1985. The acquisition of syntactic knowledge. The MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bloom, Paul. 2000. How children learn the meanings of words. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Brown, Roger. 1973. A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674732469

Câmara Júnior, Joaquim Mattoso. 1976. História e estrutura da língua portuguesa. Rio de Janeiro: Padrão.

Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. New York: Praeger.

Chomsky, Noam. 1988. Language and problems of knowledge: The Managua lectures. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1993. A Minimalist Program for linguistic theory. In The view from building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Current Studies in Linguistics 28. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 2005. Three factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry 36(1): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1162/0024389052993655

Christophe, Anne, Séverine Millotte, Savita Bernal, & Jeffrey Lidz. 2008. Bootstrapping lexical and syntactic acquisition. Language and Speech 51(1–2): 61–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309080510010501

Coelho, Claudia Souza, & Paulo Ângelo Araújo-Adriano. 2021. Em favor de raízes sem diacríticos. Caderno de Squibs: Temas em Estudos Formais da Linguagem 7(2): 44–52. https://www.periodicos.unb.br/index.php/cs/article/view/40408

Corrêa, Letícia Sicuro. 2009. Bootstrapping language acquisition from a minimalist standpoint: On the identification of φ-features in Brazilian Portuguese. In A. Pires, & J. Rothman (eds.), Minimalist inquiries into child and adult language acquisition, 35–62. Studies on Language Acquisition. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110215359.1.35

Costa, João, & Maria Cristina Figueiredo-Silva. 2006. Notas sobre a concordância verbal e nominal em português. Estudos Linguísticos 35: 95–109.

Duarte, Maria Eugenia Lammoglia. 1993. Do pronome nulo ao pronome pleno. In I. Roberts, & M. Kato (eds.), Português brasileiro: Uma viagem diacrônica, 107–28. Campinas: Editora da Unicamp.

Embick, David, & Rolf Noyer. 2007. Distributed Morphology and the syntax-morphology interface. In G. Ramchand, & C. Reiss (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces, 289–324. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199247455.013.0010

Faria, Pablo. 2015. A computational study of cross-situational lexical learning of Brazilian Portuguese. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning, 45–54. Lisbon, Portugal: Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W15-2408

Fazly, Afsaneh, Afra Alishahi, & Suzanne Stevenson. 2010. A probabilistic computational model of cross-situational word learning. Cognitive Science 34(6): 1017–1063. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01104.x

Ferrari-Neto, José, & Marcus André Ferraz de Lima. 2015. Aquisição da morfologia flexional verbal em português brasileiro – um estudo com dados de compreensão. Revista Prolíngua, 10(1): 106–120.

Figueira, Rosa Attié. 2010. O que a investigação sobre o erro na fala da criança deve a Saussure. Cadernos de Estudos Lingüísticos 52(1): 115–144. https://doi.org/10.20396/cel.v52i1.8637206

Fisher, Cynthia, Hall, D. Geoffrey, Rakowitz, Susan, & Lila Gleitman. 1994. When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth. Lingua, 92: 333–375. https://doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(94)90346-8

Guimarães, Maximiliano. 2017. Os fundamentos da teoria linguística de Chomsky. Petrópolis: Vozes.

Gleitman, Lila. 1990. The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition, 1(1): 3–55. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327817la0101_2

Gold, E. Mark. 1967. Language identification in the limit. Information and Control, 10(5): 447–474. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0019-9958(67)91165-5

Golinkoff, Roberta, & Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. 2000. Word learning: icon, index or symbol? In A. L. Woodward, R. M. Golinkoff, L. Bloom, K. Hirsh-Pasek, L. B. Smith, N. Akhtar, M. Tomasello, & G. Hollich (eds.), Becoming a word learner: A debate on lexical acquisition, Counterpoints: Cognition, Memory, and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Halle, Morris, & Alec Marantz. (1993). Distribuited Morphology and the pieces of inflection. In K. Hale & S. J. Keyser (eds.), The view from building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 111–176. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Halle, Morris, & Alec Marantz. 1994. Some keys of Distributed Morphology. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 21: 275–88.

Halle, Morris. 1997. Distributed Morphology: Impoverishment and Fission. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 30: 425–39.

Harris, James. 1999. Nasal depalatalization no, morphological wellformedness sí: The structure of Spanish word classes. In Papers on Morphology and Syntax, Cycle One, 33: 47–82. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kato, Mary, Martins Ana Maria, Nunes Jairo. 2023. The Syntax of Portuguese. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Kelly, Barbara, Gillian Wigglesworth, Rachel Nordlinger, & Joseph Blythe. 2014. The Acquisition of Polysynthetic Languages. Language and Linguistics Compass 8(2): 51–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12062

Klima, Edward S. 1964. Relatedness between Grammatical Systems. Language 40(1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/411919

Kučerová, Ivona. 2018. ɸ-features at the syntax-semantics interface: Evidence from nominal inflection. Linguistic Inquiry 49(4): 813–845. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00290

Lees, Robert B. 1957. Syntactic Structures. Language 33(3): 375–408. https://doi.org/10.2307/411160

Lightfoot, David. 1979. Principles of diachronic syntax. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Lorandi, Aline. 2010. Formas morfológicas variantes na aquisição da morfologia: evidências da sensibilidade da criança à gramática da língua. Letrônica 3(1): 81–96.

MacWhinney, Brian. 2014. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk, Volume II: the database (3rd ed.). New York: Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315805641

Maldonade, Irani Rodrigues. 2003. Erros na aquisição da flexão verbal: Uma análise interacionista. PhD dissertation, Campinas: Universidade Estadual de Campinas.

Marantz, Alec. 1997. No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 4(2): 202–225.

Marcus, Gary F., Steven Pinker, Michael Ullman, Michelle Hollander, T. John Rosen, Fei Xu, & Harald Clahsen. 1992. Overregularization in language acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 57(4): 1–178. https://doi.org/10.2307/1166115

Markman, Ellen M. 1990. Constraints children place on word meanings. Cognitive Science 14(1): 57–77. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1401_4

Minussi, Rafael Dias; Bassani, Indaiá de Santana. 2017. Em favor do conteúdo semântico das raízes. Revista Letras, Curitiba, UFPR, n. 96, p. 152-173, jul./dez.

Name, Maria. Cristina Lobo. 2008. Pistas prosódicas, sintáticas e semânticas facilitadoras da identificação dos elementos das categorias N e ADJ. In XXII Encontro Nacional da Anpoll.

Niyogi, Partha, & Robert C. Berwick. 1995. The logical problem of language change. A.I. Memo No. 1516, Cambridge, MA: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Nunes, Rosane. 2003. Evolução cíclica do futuro do presente do latim ao português. Master’s dissertation, Pelotas: Universidade Católica de Pelotas.

Nunes, Jairo. 2020. Especificação morfológica de pronomes nominativos, concordância verbal e sujeitos nulos em português brasileiro. Fórum Linguístico 17(Núm. Esp.): 4658–4672.

Olsen, Susan, Rochelle Lieber, & Pavol Stekauer (eds.). 2014. ‘Delineating derivation and compounding’. In The Oxford handbook of derivational morphology, 26–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pearl, Lisa. 2010. Using computational modeling in language acquisition research. In E. Blom & S. Unsworth (Eds.), Experimental methods in language acquisition research, Vol. 27: 163–184. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/lllt.27.10pea

Pinker, Steven. 1989. Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Pinker, Steven, & Alan Prince. 1988. On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition. Cognition 28: 73–193.

Quine, Willard van Norman. 1960. Word and object. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Rainer, Franz. 2005. Semantic change in word formation. Linguistics 43(2): 415–441. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.2005.43.2.415

Resende, Maurício Sartori, & Rodolfo Ilari. 2020. Mudança semântica e formação de palavras. Letras, no. 60, 247–54. https://doi.org/10.5902/2176148543108

Resende, Maurício Sartori, & Beatriz Pires Santana. 2019. A relação entre raízes, gênero, classe e significado. Revista da ABRALIN 18(1). https://doi.org/10.25189/rabralin.v18i1.481

Resende, Maurício. 2020. Mudança semântica no domínio intravocabular: o caso das raízes cranberry do português. In: Ilari, Rodolfo; Basso, Renato (org.). História do português brasileiro: história semântica do português brasileiro, 120-143. São Paulo: Contexto.

Resende, Maurício Sartori. 2021a. Bebês são não lexicalistas: considerações sobre o estatuto de palavra na aquisição da linguagem. Diadorim 23(2): 401–420. https://doi.org/10.35520/diadorim.2021.v23n2a40547

Resende, Maurício Sartori. 2021b. As palavras que os bebês não dizem: revisitando o problema da noção de “palavra” à luz da aquisição da linguagem. Revista do GEL 18(2): 128–159. http://dx.doi.org/10.21165/gel.v18i2.3134

Sandmann, Antonio José. 2010. A expressão da pejoratividade. Revista Letras 38. https://doi.org/10.5380/rel.v38i0.19181

Santos, Ana Lúcia, & Ruth E. V. Lopes. 2017. Primeiros passos na aquisição da sintaxe: direcionalidade, movimento do verbo e flexão. In A. L. Santos & M. J. Freitas (eds.), Aquisição de língua materna e não materna: questões gerais e dados do português, 155–175. Berlin: Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.889429

Siddiqi, Daniel. 2009. Syntax within the word: economy, allomorphy, and argument selection in Distributed Morphology. Linguistics Today 138. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Siskind, Jeffrey Mark. 1996. A computational study of cross-situational techniques for learning word-to-meaning mappings. Cognition 61(1–2): 39–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(96)00728-7

Stevens, Jon Scott, Gleitman, Lila, Trueswell, John C., & Charles Yang. 2017. The pursuit of word meanings. Cognitive Science 41: 638–676. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12416

Takahira, Aline Garcia Rodero. 2013. O processo de aquisição de verbos irregulares no português brasileiro. Estudos Linguísticos 42(1): 430–441.

Teixeira, Luciana, & Letícia Sicuro Corrêa. 2008. Pistas morfológicas e sintáticas na delimitação de adjetivos em relações predicativas e de adjunção na aquisição do PB. Revista da ABRALIN. https://revista.abralin.org/index.php/abralin/article/view/990

Trueswell, John C., Medina, Tamara Nicol, Hafri, Alon, & Lila Gleitman. 2013. Propose but Verify: Fast mapping meets cross-situational word learning. Cognitive Psychology 66(1): 126–156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2012.10.001

Wexler, Kenneth, & Peter W. Culicover. 1983. Formal principles of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/414105

Wuerges, Talita Ewald. 2014. A aquisição da morfologia verbal por crianças falantes de português brasileiro e o uso de formas variantes. Masters’ thesis. São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo.

Yang, Charles D. 2002. Knowledge and learning in natural language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yang, Charles D. 2016. The price of linguistic productivity: How children learn to break the rules of language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Yang, Charles, & Tom Roeper. 2011. Minimalism and language acquisition. Manuscript.

Published

2024-10-03

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.