ABSTRACT
The nature of the relationship between the formal theory of learnability, the theory of grammar, and the theory of acquisition poses a difficult conceptual problem. In particular, the human capacity to acquire language seems to be largely automatic, outside the conscious control of the learner. The child need not intend to acquire this knowledge and, furthermore, need not have any special intellectual gifts in order to succeed. Crucially, the foregoing problem did not require an infinite space of possible grammars; finite spaces can quickly become so large that sorting through them becomes a practical impossibility. In general, any given grammatical construction in a language has its particular form as the result of the interaction between a number of different elements of grammar, including the values of various parameters. The language, itself, would emerge from the interactions of automata; that is, it would result from the ways in which the basic trees would combine to form more complex structures.
