Commentary on Daelemans, Gillis, and Durieux
Prahlad Gupta · 1994
The article by Daelemans et al. bears on an important question about the adequacy of the "Principles and Parameters " framework as the basis of a process account of language learning (exemplified, for instance, by the work of Dresher and Kaye 1990). As Gupta and Touretzky (1991, 1994) have pointed out, a learning system based on a particular linguistic description (of metrical phenomena, for example) can at best learn whatever is describable within that linguistic formalism; however, important aspects of real-world stress data do not appear amenable to parameter-based description, and are therefore unlearnable for a parameter-based system. In the present work, the authors make a careful examination of main stress as-signment in Dutch, showing that the consensus (parameterized) linguistic analysis for Dutch yields correct stress for only 81.1 % of the words in a representative corpus. The problem is that when words are represented only by their syllable weights (as required by metrical theory), they can be ambiguous with respect to stress assignment. A parameter-based procedure therefore can at best learn only the "regular " 81.1% of the data. By assuming certain lexically specified exception markings, the framework