Children always go beyond the input: The Maximise Minimal Means perspective

Abstract

Cournane’s “A developmental view on incrementation in language change” outlines a model of child-driven variation and change, which highlights the significance of an overgeneralisation and retraction pattern observed in child language acquisition. The purpose of this commentary is to endorse this proposal as a sizeable step in the direction of facilitating more concrete understanding of the intuition that children can, in a relevant sense, be drivers of linguistic change. Specifically, my objective is to demonstrate the striking way in which Cournane’s proposal converges with an independently proposed model which originated as an attempt to understand crosslinguistic variation in a way that explicitly draws on all of Chomsky’s Three Factors: universal grammar (UG), the input, and relevant aspects of domain-general cognition (Chomsky 2005). This is Biberauer’s so-called Maximise Minimal Means (MMM) model (Biberauer 2011 et seq.; see Biberauer 2017a, Biberauer in press). The commentary is structured as follows: Section 2 introduces the MMM model, Section 3 considers how it incorporates overgeneralisation and retraction to account for patterns of acquisition, variation, and change, and Section 4 concludes.