Learnability of syntactic formalisms (was: OT Syntax)

* Marcus Smith <smithma@...> [001114 05:59]:
> And to be fair, for all of you who have been brainwashed into believing
> that Minimalism is the Anti-Christ, Minimalism is one of three theories of
> syntax that have been shown to be learnable, the other two being Tree
> Ajoining Grammar and Categorial Grammar. The jury is still out on OT, and
> all the rest (Transformational Grammar, Lexical Function Grammar, HPSG,
> Role and Reference Grammar, etc) have been proved to be unlearnable.
> Chomsky was not happy to hear that about his theory. :-)
Sources for that? I had HPSG in Linguistics 101, once I saw it in terms
of object oriented programming it was clear sailing. And how do you define
"unlearnable"?


t.