Born to parse : how children select their languages by David W. LightfootPublication Date: 2020
In this book, David Lightfoot argues that just as some birds are born to chirp, humans are born to parse-predisposed to assign linguistic structures to their ambient external language. This approach to language acquisition makes two contributions to the development of Minimalist thinking. First, it minimizes grammatical theory, dispensing with three major entities- parameters; an evaluation metric for the selection of grammars; and any independent parsing mechanism. Instead, Lightfoot argues, children parse their ambient external language using their internal language.