Department of Linguistics, Language and Communication

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Factors 2 and 3: Towards a principled approach
(Universitat Aut�noma de Barcelona, 2019) Biberauer, Theresa
This paper seeks to make progress in our understanding of the non-UG components of Chomsky�s (2005) Three Factors model. In relation to the input (Factor 2), I argue for the need to formu-late a suitably precise hypothesis about which aspects of the input will qualify as �intake� and, hence, serve as the basis for grammar construction. In relation to Factor 3, I highlight a specific cognitive bias that appears well motivated outside of language, while also having wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of how I-language grammars are constructed, and why they should have the crosslinguistically comparable form that generativists have always argued human languages have. This is Maximise Minimal Means (MMM). I demonstrate how its incorporation into our model of grammar acquisition facilitates understanding of diverse facts about natural language typology, acquisition, both in �stable� and �unstable� contexts, and also the ways in which linguistic systems may change over time.