Minimalism and Language Acquisition

Perhaps more clearly than any other field, the study of child language acquisition highlights the continuity from the Principles & Parameters framework (Chomsky 1981) to the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995). As is the case for all meaningful theoretical developments, under Minimalism new challenges emerge, puzzles are cast under different lights, while important insights from previous work can still be retained; this chapter provides an overview of these issues. The first part builds on the continuity from P&P to Minimalism, with focus on the role of parameters in the theory of language acquisition and the mechanisms of learning. The second part turns to the Minimalist innovations, specifically how the new formulations of the syntactic system bring new tools to the explanation of child language.

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