A Minimalist Model of Language Acquisition

This monograph develops a weak deterministic model of language acquisition that can accommodate first language (L1) acquisition, language change, and second language (L2) acquisition: namely the Economical Parameter-Setting model. This model is achieved by adopting the notion of economy employed in the theory of Universal Grammar (UG) developed in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) and by modifying a pre-minimalist model of language learnability and language change developed by Clark and Roberts (1993). The main claims are that the processes of L1 acquisition and L2 acquisition are governed by the same economy principles and that the differences lie neither in different governing properties of the acquisition processes nor in different degrees of UG availability, but in factors that cause the divergence of parameter-settings from the input setting. The proposed causal factors are twofold: (i) particular variabilities of the input caused by L2 learning environments and (ii) the L1 lexicon. These factors contribute to an increased obscurity and ambiguity of the parameter settings embodied in the input.