Abstract for Charles Yang's talk

The Unit of Linguistic Transmission
Charles Yang (University of Pennsylvania)
December 4, 2008 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, The CUNY Graduate Center

It is often said that language variation reduces to the lexicon. But as we shall see, that does not necessarily simplify the learning problem for the child. Through analysis of linguistic corpora, we show that the item-based view of language acquisition is untenable even for word learning. The learner must start with generalizations or rules, rather than lexical items, from the outset of acquisition. We review several empirical studies of morphological acquisition showing that even in isolated pockets of irregularity, the child organizes the lexicon through (sometimes arbitrary) rules. The fact that it is rules rather than words that constitution the unit of linguistic transmission has explanatory power in language change, as we shall illustrate with a study of changes in the strong verb system of Old English.