Intuitions, Category and Structure: Comments on McDaniel and Cairns

Abstract

How children can acquire the full range of anaphor-antecedent relations in a language is a central topic of language acquisition, and a most natural one to pursue in light of recent developments in generative grammar. The paper by Helen Cairns and Dana McDaniel (henceforth, C&M) represents a contribution to the growing body of research on this question that is based on strong assumptions about the role of Universal Grammar in the acquisition process. C&M choose to operate within a framework making two fundamental assumptions: (a) that all applicable principles of UG are operable in the course of first language acquisition and (b) that a child’s grammar at any given stage of development will not violate any principles of UG (these two conditions define what they call the ‘Continuity Hypothesis’; Pinker, 1984; Borer and Wexler, 1987). Although they defend their choice of assumptions on purely methodological grounds, a good part of the grounding motivation for choosing something so strong is empirical: How do children learn to identify anaphors (especially null ones), and how do they learn the contraints on what they may take as antecedents? Trying seriously to solve these difficulties drives one rapidly in the direction of strong nativist assumptions.