Journal ArticleDOI
The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?
TLDR
It is argued that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation and how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience is suggested.Abstract:
We argue that an understanding of the faculty of language requires substantial interdisciplinary cooperation. We suggest how current developments in linguistics can be profitably wedded to work in evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience. We submit that a distinction should be made between the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB)and in the narrow sense (FLN) . FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the computational mechanisms for recursion, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements. We hypothesize that FLN only includes recursion and is the only uniquely human component of the faculty of language. We further argue that FLN may have evolved for reasons other than language, hence comparative studies might look for evidence of such computations outside of the domain of communication (for example, number, navigation, and social relations).read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Production of Supra-regular Spatial Sequences by Macaque Monkeys.
TL;DR: Using a production task, it is shown that macaque monkeys can be trained to produce time-symmetrical embedded spatial sequences whose formal description requires supra-regular grammars or, equivalently, a push-down stack automaton.
Biolinguistics: forays into human cognitive biology.
TL;DR: The field of biolinguistics is surveyed, the roots of the field's core research agenda are revisited, the various factors that led to its recent re-emergence are considered, and suggestions for future inquiry are offered.
Book ChapterDOI
Grafts follow from Merge
TL;DR: Van Riemsdijk as discussed by the authors showed that the concept of grafts can be given a natural interpretation in a framework that makes use of internal and external merge, and that grafts must exist and are not an odd problem for phrase structure.
Journal ArticleDOI
On the Absence of X-within-X Recursion in Human Grammar
Boban Arsenijević,Wolfram Hinzen +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that these constraints on recursion follow from the way in which single-cycle derivations organize semantic information in grammar.
Journal ArticleDOI
Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn't help
TL;DR: It is concluded that, in each of these domains, the innate UG-specified knowledge posited does not, in fact, simplify the task facing the learner.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
Ann S. Ferebee,Noam Chomsky +1 more
TL;DR: Methodological preliminaries of generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence; theory of performance; organization of a generative grammar; justification of grammar; descriptive and explanatory theories; evaluation procedures; linguistic theory and language learning.
Book
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
TL;DR: Generative grammars as theories of linguistic competence as discussed by the authors have been used as a theory of performance for language learning. But they have not yet been applied to the problem of language modeling.
Book
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
TL;DR: In this paper, secondary sexual characters of fishes, amphibians and reptiles are presented. But the authors focus on the secondary sexual characteristics of fishes and amphibians rather than the primary sexual characters.
Book
The Minimalist Program
TL;DR: This twentieth-anniversary edition reissues Noam Chomsky's classic work The Minimalist Program with a new preface by the author, which emphasizes that the minimalist approach developed in the book and in subsequent work "is a program, not a theory."
Journal Article
The descent of man and selection in relation to sex: documento
TL;DR: Part I. Sexual Selection (continued): Secondary sexual characters of fishes, amphibians and reptiles, and secondarySexual characters of birds.