The Complexity of Trees, Universal Grammar and Economy Conditions
Chris Collins
November 2022 

In this squib, I argue that the child faces a severe computational complexity problem in parsing even the simplest of trees: the number of possible trees consistent with UG grows exponentially as a function of the number of lexical items. Economy conditions have the result of drastically decreasing the complexity of the parsing task. I also discuss the relationship between UG, I-language, economy conditions and explanatory adequacy. (Published in Biolinguistics vol. 16, 2022: https://bioling.psychopen.eu/index.php/bioling/article/view/9573)

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006774 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Biolinguistics vol. 16, 2022
keywords:	binary branching, catalan numbers, super catalan numbers, economy conditions, explanatory adequacy, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [August 2022]
Downloaded:	876 times

 

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