The Automatic Identification and Classification of Clitic Pronouns

The dominant view of parameter setting is that setting a parameter is the same as setting a switch. On this view, the learner is seated at a control panel consisting of a fixed set of switches, where each switch corresponds to a point of cross-linguistic variation. The learner monitors the input stream waiting for evidence of a very particular type to appear; in response to this evidence, a ‘trigger’, the learner is allowed to set one of the switches. When the learner has encountered and responded to all the relevant ‘triggers’ in the input stream, the entire set of switches will be correctly set and the learner will have converged on the target sequence of parameter settings. We will refer to the above sequence of encountering and responding to a trigger as the problem of ‘trigger detection’.