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This article examines several grammatical developments that have received relatively little attention, but that may be more pervasive than previously recognized. They involve the functional extension of markers of grammatical dependency from sentence-level syntax into larger discourse and pragmatic domains. Such developments are first illustrated with material from Navajo and Central Alaskan Yup'ik, then surveyed more briefly in several other unrelated languages. In some cases, secondary effects of such changes can reshape basic clause structure. An awareness of these processes can accordingly aid in understanding certain recurring but hitherto unexplained arrays of basic morphological and syntactic patterns, exemplified here with cases of homophonous grammatical markers and of ergative/accusative splits. Like developments described by Gildea (1997, 1998) and Evans (2007), they involve the use of dependent clauses as independent sentences, but the processes described here differ from those in both the mechanisms at work and their results.
An account of grammatical acquisition is developed within the parameter setting framework applied to a generalized categorial grammar (GCG). The GCG is embedded in a default inheritance network yielding a natural partial ordering (reflecting generality) of parameters that determines a partial order for parameter setting. Computational simulation shows that several resulting acquisition procedures are effective on a parameter set expressing major typological distinctions based on constituent order, and defining 70 distinct full languages and over 200 subset languages. The effects on acquisition of inductive bias, that is, of differing initial parameter settings, are explored via computational simulation.
Computational simulation of populations of language learners and users instantiating the acquisition model shows that: (1) variant acquisition procedures, with differing inductive biases, exert differing selective pressures on the evolution of language(s); and (2) acquisition procedures will evolve towards more efficient variants in the environment of adaptation. The reciprocal evolution of language acquisition procedures and of languages creates a genuinely coevolutionary dynamic, despite the relative speed of linguistic selection for language variants compared to natural selection for variant language acquisition procedures.