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<Paper uid="P84-1070">
  <Title>A DISCOVERY PROCEDURE FOR CERTAIN PHONOLOGICAL RULES</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> For generative grammarians, such as Chomsky (1965), a primary problem of linguistics is to explain how the language learner can acquire the grammar of his or her language on the basis of the limited evidence available to him or her. Chomsky introduced the idealization of instantaneous acquisition, which 1 adopt here, in order to model the language acquisition device as a function from primary linguistic data to possible grammars, rather than as a process.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Assuming that the set of possible human languages is small, rather than large, appears to make acquisition easier, since there are fewer possible grammars to choose from, and less data should be required to choose between them. Accordingly, generative linguists are interested in delimiting the class of possible human languages. This is done by looking for properties common to all human languages, or universals.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Together, these universals form universal grammar, a set of principles that all human languages obey. Assuming that universal grammar is innate, the language learner can use it to restrict the number of possible grammars he or she must consider when learning a language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> As part of universal grammar, the language learner is supposed to innately possess an evaluation metric, which is used to &amp;quot;decide&amp;quot; between two grammars when both are consistent with other principles of universal grammar and the available language data.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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