Yet any given child's experience is finite; we constantly encounter sentences that we have never heard or seen before.
In an age of ever-shrinking attention spans, it is unnerving to encounter sentences that go on for pages, and syntax that at times seems to belong to a foreign language.
There is good psycholinguistic evidence that those who encounter sentences (like (3) and (4)) using the terms 'he' and 'man' think more readily of males than of females.[2] If this is right, then the use of these words can be seen as contributing to the invisibility of women.
Second, when listeners encounter target sentences which do not convey any novelties but only previously 'given' already known information, the structuring of the speech input is driven by prosody again.
Only readers who have spent too much time in a seminar room will be pleased to encounter a sentence declaring, for instance, that the "many-dimensional contours of my bubble (not just space-time, but what we might call moral or liberty space) trace the extent of my rights".
A few pages on, encountering girlish sentences like "What had she been thinking, sleeping with Brad Glidden?
It is rare to encounter a sentence in the book without at least one qualifying or intensifying adverb or adjective; in the space of a page and a half, one finds "very," "strong," "strongly" (twice), "perhaps" (twice), "frequently," "tended to," "a kind of" and "exact".
A learner in situation (i), (ii) or (iii) is in good shape, for she can easily use the pld as a basis for correcting her hypothesis as follows: whenever she encounters a sentence in the data (i.e., a sentence of L) that is not generated by H, she has to 'expand' her hypothesis so that it generates that sentence.
As the banter died down, Doocy, who rarely encounters a sentence he can't mangle, faced the camera and addressed the folks at home.
He said, "I encountered a sentence that was much quoted: 'The efficient-market hypothesis is the best established fact in social sciences.' Any sentence like that is a red flag to an ambitious academic".
E.g., as mentioned above (§2.2.1(d)), a learner of Spanish setting the head parameter to 'Heads optional' must be able to tell that she has, in fact, encountered a sentence that lacks a Head.
