Modelling Grammar Growth; Universal grammar without innate principles or parameters

This paper 1 sketches a solution to the string-to-structure problem in first language acquisition within a set of emergentist assumptions that minimizes innate linguistic knowledge, minimizes demands for linguistic analysis by the language learner, and maximizes the projection of lexical properties of words. These conceptual constraints minimize the rules that have to be developed---in number, in complexity, and in diversity. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the compatibility of theories of grammar which describe grammars of natural languages in terms of inheritance hierarchies of constraints on linguistic object types such as word, phrase, (syntactic) category, semantic content, referential index, nominal object and the like. The constructs and distinctions that would have to be attributed to the infant learner in order to represent the knowledge of words at the one-word stage provide a foundation for developing, via incremental addition of properties and distinctions, a co..