
The “verb second constraint” could explain how people acquire language - pepys
http://phys.org/news/2015-12-linguistic-verb-constraint-people-language.html
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shmageggy
I'm continually astonished at how much sway Universal Grammar still holds.
This entire field has completely ignored the fact that AI and machine learning
exist. Chomsky was and is a genius, but Max Planck was right when he said
science advances one funeral at a time.

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XaspR8d
I definitely agree that universal grammar has been dying a long slow death,
but despite press coverage, I suspect universalists are the minority nowadays.
Either way I hardly think linguistics has ignored AI/machine learning. In
general there's an anticipation of eventual synergy between the domains, but
ML has yet to magically solve the "poverty of stimulus" issues with pattern
recognition that originally prompted hypotheses like UG...

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shmageggy
Ah sorry, by "entire field" I meant the subset of linguists who are doing this
kind of research. And I agree that AI/ML hasn't solved every problem raised by
the poverty of the stimulus, but more importantly I think it is clear at this
point that we should be framing these phenomena in terms of learning and
inductive biases rather than solely in terms of UG.

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alextgordon
This is a completely useless article, which creates more questions than it
answers. Chiefly among them: why would a linguistic researcher believe that
one shared property of Indo-European languages implies a universal grammar?

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XaspR8d
The researchers are identfiying that languages that lost V2 may have underwent
specific other syntactic changes in the same period. Since these changes co-
occurred in multiple languages at different times, they suggest it's likely
there is an underlying structure linking them (...which they conveniently have
an explanation for within their particular brand of universalism).

Of course just because language has deeper structures doesn't mean the
structures are actually universal. I happen to like a lot of the syntactic
mechanisms suggested by minimalists (the work on things like adjective order
and clause relations is fascinating) but I don't necessarily believe it's
compelling that any of it is an inherent feature in the brain...

EDIT: Here are some presentations by the authors, though I must admit I don't
have the time to look though at the moment.
[http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/projects/traces-o...](http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/projects/traces-
of-history/presentations/)

