Freitag, 15.00 Uhr
This paper can be thought of as an exercise in the application of the theory of parameters to a set of data. I will discuss a fairly simple, well-known and well-understood parameter, and show how evidence from language change, language acquisition and creolisation supports the idea that there is an unmarked value of this parameter: the "weak" value in terms of the proposals in Chomsky (1995). This leads to the contention that the weak value of a parameter is always the unmarked value. Drawing on work by Clark & Roberts (1993), we will see that this conclusion is underpinned by the theory of learnability.
The parameter in question is the one that governs verb-movement to Infl. In Section 1, I present the basic data that motivates the postulation of such a parameter. In Section 2, I describe the evidence that the value of this parameter changed in 16th-century English. In Section 3, I offer an interpretation of the recently-discovered "root-infinitive" stage of the acquisition of English and many other languages that amounts to proposing that root infinitives result from the verb-movement parameter being initially set to the unmarked value. In Section 4, I argue, concentrating on Haitian, that French-based creoles have the default value of this parameter, perhaps because creoles generally have default parameter values (cf. Bickerton (1984)), an idea that I attempt to substantiate.
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