This course will look at the computational and mathematical theory of how grammars can be learned from strings.  
Any theory of language acquisition must at bottom rest on some solution to this problem.

In the last ten years there has been very rapid progress in this field using what is called distributional learning; we will cover a family of techniques for learning context free grammars and richer formalisms equivalent to Minimalist Grammars. We will review empirical work using naturally occurring corpora, but the primary goal is to understand the fundamental principles that underly this problem.