Characterizing learnability conditions for cue-based learners in parametric language systems

Applications of Formal Learning Theory to the problem of Language Acquisition have often had a rather narrow scope, due to the difficulty of expressing general results in a vocabulary meaningful for the allied disciplines of Developmental Psycholinguistics and Linguistics. In this paper we provide a complete characterization of the learnability properties of parametric systems of grammars of the kind hypothesized by Chomsky [5] with respect to the class of cue-based learners. In addition, we show that the conditions of the application of our negative learnability results are local, in the sense that they involve inspection of only a fragment of a parameter space and can be verified by standard tools of linguistic analysis. Parametric Linguistics and Cue-based