On the Use of Triggers in Parameter Setting

A major question facing the study of language learnability lies in determining what properties a class of grammars must possess to allow learning to take place. This article continues the inquiry begun by Gibson and Wexler (1994), studying the importance of triggers, sentences that "reveal" the settings of parameters of grammatical variation. We formalize a number of conceptions of triggers with the aim of characterizing convergence of a simple learning algorithm by their presence. Then we demonstrate how slight changes in linguistic analysis can significantly affect the (non)existence of triggers, looking closely at Gibson and Wexler's word order/V2 parameter space.