On the use of triggers in parameter setting
Robert A. Frank, Shyam Kapur · 1996
A major question facing the study of language learnability lies in determining what properties a class of grammars must possess to allow learning to take place. This paper continues the inquiry begun by Gibson and Wexler (1994), studying the importance of triggers, sentences which "reveal" the settings of parameters of grammatical variation. We formalize a number of conceptions of triggers in the aim of characterizing convergence of a simple learning algorithm by their presence. Then, we demonstrate how slightchanges in linguistic analysis can significantly affect the (non-)existence of triggers, looking closely at Gibson and Wexler's word order/V2 parameter space.