Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...
Jackendoff claims that current theories of generativegrammar commit a “scientific mistake” by assuming that syntax is the sole source of linguistic organization (“syntactocentrism”). The claim is false, and furthermore, Jackendoff's solution to the alleged problem, the parallel architecture, creates a real problem that exists in no other theory of generativegrammar.
The generativegrammar approach to language seeks a fully explicit account of the modular systems of knowledge (competence) that underlies the human language capacity. Similarly, the relevance-theoretic approach to pragmatics attempts an explicit characterisation of the sub-personal systems involved in utterance interpretation. As an on-line performance system, however, it is subject to certain additional constraints; this is demonstrated by the way in which matters of computational (processing effort) economy are currently employed in the two types of theory. A (...) sub-module of “discourse competence” is shown to be compatible with and complementary to the wider system of pragmatic processes. (shrink)
The theoretical debate in linguistics during the past half-century bears an uncanny parallel to the politics of the (now defunct) Communist Bloc. The parallels are not so much in the revolutionary nature of Chomsky's ideas as in the Bolshevik manner of his takeover of linguistics (Koerner 1994) and in the Trotskyist (“permanent revolution”) flavor of the subsequent development of the doctrine of Transformational GenerativeGrammar (TGG) (Townsend & Bever 2001, pp. 37–40). By those standards, Jackendoff is quite a (...) party faithful (a Khrushchev or a Dubcek, rather than a Solzhenitsyn or a Sakharov) who questions some of the components of the dogma, yet stops far short of repudiating it. (shrink)
While the analytical philosophy of science regards inconsistent theories as disastrous, Chomsky allows for the temporary tolerance of inconsistency between the hypotheses and the data. However, in linguistics there seem to be several types of inconsistency. The present paper aims at the development of a novel metatheoretical framework which provides tools for the representation and evaluation of inconsistencies in linguistic theories. The metatheoretical model relies on a system of paraconsistent logic and distinguishes between strong and weak inconsistency. Strong inconsistency is (...) destructive in that it leads to logical chaos. In contrast, weak inconsistency may be constructive, because it is capable of accounting for the simultaneous presence of seemingly incompatible structures. However, paraconsistent logic cannot grasp the dynamism of the emergence and resolution of weak inconsistencies. Therefore, the metatheoretical approach is extended to plausible argumentation. The workability of this metatheoretical model is tested with the help of a detailed case study on an analysis of discontinuous constituents in Government-Binding Theory. (shrink)
Chapter one Introduction The lexicon has come to play an increasingly important role in generativegrammar. The first widely read monograph on generative ...
One of the major arenas for debate within generativegrammar is the nature of paradigmatic relations among words. Intervening in key debates at the interface between syntax and semantics, this book examines the relation between structure and meaning, and analyses how it affects the internal properties of words and corresponding syntactic manifestations. Adapting notions from the Evo-Devo project in biology (the idea of 'co-linearity' between structural units and behavioural manifestations) Juan Uriagereka addresses a major puzzle: how words can (...) be both decomposable so as to be acquired by children, and atomic, so that they do not manifest themselves as modular to adults. (shrink)
Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...
Building on the success of the bestselling first edition, the second edition of this textbook provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the major issues in Principles and Parameters syntactic theory, including phrase structure, the lexicon, case theory, movement, and locality conditions. Includes new and extended problem sets in every chapter, all of which have been annotated for level and skill type. Features three new chapters on advanced topics including vP shells, object shells, control, gapping and ellipsis and an additional (...) chapter on advanced topics in binding. Offers a brief survey of both Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Succeeds in strengthening the reader's foundational knowledge, and prepares them for more advanced study. Supported by an instructor's manual and online resources for students and instructors, available at www.blackwellpublishing.com/carnie. (shrink)
In The Dynamics of Meaning , Gennaro Chierchia tackles central issues in dynamic semantics and extends the general framework. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of dynamic semantics and discusses in detail the phenomena that have been used to motivate it, such as "donkey" sentences and adverbs of quantification. The second chapter explores in greater depth the interpretation of indefinites and issues related to presuppositions of uniqueness and the "E-type strategy." In Chapter 3, Chierchia extends the dynamic approach to the domain (...) of syntactic theory, considering a range of empirical problems that includes backwards anaphora, reconstruction effects, and weak crossover. The final chapter develops the formal system of dynamic semantics to deal with central issues of definites and presupposition. Chierchia shows that an approach based on a principled enrichment of the mechanisms dealing with meaning is to be preferred on empirical grounds over approaches that depend on an enrichment of the syntactic apparatus. Dynamics of Meaning illustrates how seemingly abstract stances on the nature of meaning can have significant and far-reaching linguistic consequences, leading to the detection of new facts and influencing our understanding of the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface. (shrink)
More and more researchers are examining grammar acquisition from theoretical perspectives that treat it as an emergent phenomenon. In this essay, I argue that a robustly developmental perspective provides a potential explanation for some of the well-known crosslinguistic features of early child language: the process of acquisition is shaped in part by the developmental constraints embodied in von Baer’s law of development. An established model of development, the Developmental Lock, captures and elucidates the probabilistic generalizations at the heart of (...) von Baer’s law. When this model is applied to the acquisition of grammar, it predicts that grammatical achievements that are more generatively entrenched will emerge earlier in development and will be more developmentally resilient than those that are less generatively entrenched. I show that the first prediction is supported by a wealth of psycholinguistic evidence involving typically developing children and that the second prediction is supported by numerous studies involving both children who receive deficient linguistic input and children who experience various language impairments. The success of this model demonstrates the analytic potential of a developmental approach to the study of language acquisition. (shrink)
We present a generative distributional model for the unsupervised induction of natural language syntax which explicitly models constituent yields and contexts. Parameter search with EM produces higher quality analyses than previously exhibited by unsupervised systems, giving the best published unsupervised parsing results on the ATIS corpus. Experiments on Penn treebank sentences of comparable length show an even higher F1 of 71% on nontrivial brackets. We compare distributionally induced and actual part-of-speech tags as input data, and examine extensions to the (...) basic model. We discuss errors made by the system, compare the system to previous models, and discuss upper bounds, lower bounds, and stability for this task. (shrink)
Katz offers such a grammatical account, in which makes it possible for the first time to explain the illocutionary potential of sentences within grammar.
This volume is a collection of original contributions from outstanding scholars in linguistics, philosophy and computational linguistics exploring the relation between word meaning and human linguistic creativity. The papers present different aspects surrounding the question of what is word meaning, a problem that has been the center of heated debate in all those disciplines that directly or indirectly are concerned with the study of language and of human cognition. The discussions are centered around the newly emerging view of the mental (...) lexicon, as outlined in the Generative Lexicon theory (Pustejovsky, 1995), which proposes a unified model for defining word meaning. The individual contributors present their evidence for a generative approach as well as critical perspectives, which provides for a volume where word meaning is not viewed only from a particular angle or from a particular concern, but from a wide variety of topics, each introduced and explained by the editors. (shrink)
Is the science of moral cognition usefully modeled on aspects of Universal Grammar? Are human beings born with an innate "moral grammar" that causes them to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness as they analyze human speech in terms of its grammatical structure? Questions like these have been at the forefront of moral psychology ever since John Mikhail revived them in his influential work on the linguistic analogy and its implications (...) for jurisprudence and moral theory. In this seminal book, Mikhail offers a careful and sustained analysis of the moral grammar hypothesis, showing how some of John Rawls' original ideas about the linguistic analogy, together with famous thought experiments like the trolley problem, can be used to improve our understanding of moral and legal judgment. The book will be of interest to philosophers, cognitive scientists, legal scholars, and other researchers in the interdisciplinary field of moral psychology. (shrink)
... the phenomenon of variable word order within a clause. Ross (), who was one of the first to discuss this phenomenon within the generative paradigm, ...
This collection covers the fundamental concepts and analytic tools of generative transformational syntax of the last half century, from Chomsky's Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (1951) to the present day. It makes available, in one place, key published material on important areas such as phrase structure, transformations, and conditions on rules and representations. Presenting articles by leading contributors to the field such as Baltin, Bokovic, Bresnan, Chomsky, Cinque, Emonds, Freidin, Hale, Higginbotham, Huang, Kayne, Lasnik, McCawley, Pollock, Postal, Reinhart, Rizzi, Ross, (...) Stowell, Torrego, Travis, Vergnaud, and Williams, this fascinating collection also includes a general introduction by the editors and an index, thus providing a comprehensive single reference resource for students and researchers alike. (shrink)
Chapter Introduction. Syntactic focus theory and the phenomenon of secondary predication The primary goal of this monograph is to examine the interaction of ...
This volume explores recent advancements in the Minimalist Program that adopt Stroikżs (1999, 2009) Survive Principle as the principle means of accounting for ...
Various restrictions on transformational grammars have been investigated in order to reduce their generative power from recursively enumerable languages to recursive languages.It will be shown that any restriction on transformational grammars defining a recursively enumerable subset of the set of all transformational grammars, is either too weak (in the sense that there does not exist a general decision procedure for all languages generated under such a restriction) or too strong (in the sense that there exists a recursive language that (...) cannot be generated by any transformational grammar thus restricted). In addition, some related problems will be discussed. (shrink)
A study on minimalist syntax develops an empirical argument for a crash-proof computational system. A crash-proof system is obtained if syntactic dependencies are strictly local (i.e. there is no long-distance Agree). Apparent long-distance dependencies turn out to be the outcome of a recursive chain on local complex dependencies. This framework allows for novel analyses of quirky subjects in Icelandic and Spanish, indefinite SE in Spanish and different types of expletive constructions in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Icelandic.
The approach to generativegrammar originating with Chomsky (1957) has been enormously successful within linguistics. Seeing such success, one wonders whether a similar approach might help us understand other human domains besides language. One such domain is morality. Could there be universal generative moral grammar? More specifically, might it be useful to moral theory to develop an explicit generative account of parts of particular moralities in the way it has proved useful to linguistics to produce (...)generative grammars for parts of particular languages? Should moral theorists attempt to develop a theory of moral universals that is analogous to the theory of universal grammar in linguistics? Can moral theorists develop a “principles and parameters” account of possible moralities inspired by the principles and parameters approach to language in current linguistics? Could there be a “minimalist” program for moral theory inspired by the minimalist program in linguistics? In this chapter we offer a preliminary account of some analogies, focusing on clarifying issues, making distinctions, and considering how—in a general way—such analogies might yield a fruitful research program for moral theory. There are two main parts to our discussion, one focusing on an analogy between generativegrammar and moral theory, the other focusing on analogies between universal grammar and theories of moral universals. In the first part, we say a little about the background and say how we are going to understand morality and moral theory. We describe certain aspects of generativegrammar and how claims about generative grammars are tested, allowing for a distinction between “competence” and “performance”. We then try to say what a corresponding “generative moral grammar” would be and how it would be tested. We next discuss a number of objections to the analogy between moral theory and generativegrammar and indicate possible responses. In the second part, we discuss certain universal constraints on grammars and consider whether there might be similar constraints on moralities. Then we discuss how linguists describe core aspects of languages in terms of principles and parameters and consider what aspects of moralities might be described in similar terms. After that we make some brief remarks about minimalism. (shrink)
The goal of this study is to reintegrate the theory of generativegrammar into the cognitive sciences. Generativegrammar was right to focus on the child's acquisition of language as its central problem, leading to the hypothesis of an innate Universal Grammar. However, generativegrammar was mistaken in assuming that the syntactic component is the sole course of combinatoriality, and that everything else is “interpretive.” The proper approach is a parallel architecture, in which (...) phonology, syntax, and semantics are autonomous generative systems linked by interface components. The parallel architecture leads to an integration within linguistics, and to a far better integration with the rest of cognitive neuroscience. It fits naturally into the larger architecture of the mind/brain and permits a properly mentalistic theory of semantics. It results in a view of linguistic performance in which the rules of grammar are directly involved in processing. Finally, it leads to a natural account of the incremental evolution of the language capacity. Key Words: evolution of language; generativegrammar; parallel architecture; semantics; syntax. (shrink)
A new semiotic model for the generation of musical texts is introduced in this article. The idea of a generativegrammar is here understood in the sense of the generative trajectory, a model elaborated by A. J. Greimas. Four levels are chosen from his trajectory for the study of musical texts, namely, those of isotopies, spatial, temporal and actorial categories, modalities and semes or figures.As an illustration, the G minor Ballade by Fr. Chopin has been examined through (...) all these levels. The most formalized aspect of the analysis is constituted by what has been called a modal grammar of the piece (the term modality understood here in its philosophico-linguistic sense). The analysis tries to show how the musical form emerges from its inner processual traits, kinetic, epistemic and other aspects of a modal nature. It thus approaches for instance the problem of segmentation from the processual and dynamic nature of musical works. Moreover, the analysis is also an attempt to study the narrativity in music, since the narrative content of a piece like Chopin's G minor Ballade is clearly seen as the result of its modal processes. (shrink)
Relational Grammar (RG) was introduced in the 1970s as a theory of grammatical relations and relation change, for example, passivization, dative shift, and raising. Furthermore, the idea behind RG was that transformations as originally designed in generativegrammar were unable to capture the common kernel of, e.g., passivization across languages. The researchconducted within RG has uncovered a wealth of phenomena for which it could produce a satisfactory analysis. Although the theory of Government and Binding has answered some (...) of the complaints, still it left many phenomena unaccounted for. Referent Systems (RSs) have been introduced by Vermeulen (1995) to overcome certain weaknesses of Dynamic Semantics. Their usefulness has not yet been realized in semantical theory. We shall show here that their significance cannot be overestimated. Namely, we will show in this paper that there exists a fundamental affinity to RG. Both handle the relation between an argument and a functor by means of a shared relational sign, which is unique for each argument. This assignment can be changed. What is interesting is that the notion of a chômeur, which is central to RG, finds a natural treatment in RSs. This coincidence is in our view not accidental but reveals some fundamental properties of the human language faculty. (shrink)
This book examines the hypothesis of "direct compositionality", which requires that semantic interpretation proceed in tandem with syntactic combination. Although associated with the dominant view in formal semantics of the 1970s and 1980s, the feasibility of direct compositionality remained unsettled, and more recently the discussion as to whether or not this view can be maintained has receded. The syntax-semantics interaction is now often seen as a process in which the syntax builds representations which, at the abstract level of logical form, (...) are sent for interpretation to the semantics component of the language faculty. In the first extended discussion of the hypothesis of direct compositionality for twenty years, this book considers whether its abandonment might have been premature and whether in fact direct compositionality is not after all a simpler and more effective conception of the grammar than the conventional account of the syntax-semantics interface in generativegrammar. It contains contributions from both sides of the debate, locates the debate in the setting of a variety of formal theories, and draws on examples from a range of languages and a range of empirical phenomena. (shrink)
[1]. Recently renewed interest in non transformational approaches to syntax [2] suggests that it might be well to take another look at categorial grammars, since they seem to have been neglected largely because they had been shown to be equivalent to context free phrase structure grammars in weak generative capacity and it was believed that such grammars were incapable of describing natural languages in a natural way. It is my purpose here to sketch a theory of grammar which (...) represents a generalization of categorial grammars of the sort invented by Ajdukiewicz (1935) and further elaborated especially by Bar Hillel (1953) and Lambek (1961). (shrink)
Jackendoff's Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution attempts to reconnect generative linguistics to the rest of cognitive science. However, by minimally acknowledging decades of work in cognitive linguistics, treating dynamical systems approaches somewhat dismissively, and clinging to certain fundamental dogma while revising others, he clearly risks satisfying no one by almost pleasing everyone.
persusasions are in addition impressed by its remarkable conciseness, and by the rigorous consistency with which it deploys its semi-formalized metalanguage, a grammatically and lexically regimented form of Sanskrit. Empiricists like Bloomfield also admired it for another, more specific reason, namely that it is based on nothing but very general principles such as simplicity, without prior commitments to any scheme of “universal grammar”, or so it seems, and proceeds from a strictly synchronic perspective. Generative linguists for their part (...) have marveled especially at its ingenious technical devices, and at intricate system of conventions governing rule application and rule interaction that it presupposes, which seem to uncannily anticipate ideas of modern linguistic theory (if only because many of them were originally borrowed from P¯. (shrink)
This paper classifies a family of grammar formalisms that extendcontext-free grammar by talking about tuples of terminal strings, ratherthan independently combining single terminal words into larger singlephrases. These include a number of well-known formalisms, such as headgrammar and linear context-free rewriting systems, but also a new formalism,(simple) literal movement grammar, which strictly extends the previouslyknown formalisms, while preserving polynomial time recognizability.The descriptive capacity of simple literal movement grammars isillustrated both formally through a weak generative capacity argument (...) and ina more practical sense by the description of conjunctive cross-serialrelative clauses in Dutch. After sketching a complexity result and drawing anumber of conclusions from the illustrations, it is then suggested that thenotion of mild context-sensitivity currently in use, that depends on therather loosely defined concept of constant growth, needs a modification toapply sensibly to the illustrated facts; an attempt at such a revision isproposed. (shrink)
We sketch an axiomatic reformalization of Generalized Phrase StructureGrammar (GPSG) – a definition purely within the language ofmathematical logic of the theory GPSG embodies. While this treatment raisesa number of theoretical issues for GPSG, our focus is not thereformalization itself but rather the method we employ. The model-theoreticapproach it exemplifies can be seen as a natural step in the evolution ofconstraint-based theories from their grammar-based antecedents. One goal ofthis paper is to introduce this approach to a broader audience and (...) todemonstrate its application to an existing theory. As such, it joins agrowing literature of similar studies. Prior studies, however, have had anumber of weaknesses – they generally offer little in the way ofconcrete examples of the advantages the approach has to offer, theytypically ignore significant portions of the theories they address, and, byfully abstracting away from the notion of grammar mechanism, they largelyabandon the possibility of establishing meaningful complexity results. Thesecond goal of the paper is to address these issues. Our thrust is to sketchthe reformalization sufficiently to illustrate the way in which it capturesFeature Specification Defaults (FSDs) and the Exhaustive Constant PartialOrdering (ECPO) property. Our definition of FSDs is considerably simplifiedrelative to the original formalization and is free of the procedural flavorthat has led some to assume that FSDs are inherently dynamic. Our treatmentof ECPO uncovers a gap in its definition in the context of partialcategories that has heretofore gone unnoticed. We offer these as ademonstration of the kind of insight that a model-theoretic reinterpretationcan bring to an existing theory. Further, since these are the types ofproperties that prior studies in this genre have failed to address, FSDs andECPO provide a means for us to explore the limitations of these approachesand to offer ways of overcoming them. Finally, the logical framework weemploy has a well defined generative capacity – definability in thisframework characterizes strong context-freeness in a particular sense. Thus,despite being more abstract than its constraint-based predecessors, themodel-theoretic approach, as exemplified here, can offer stronger complexityresults than are typically available in the constraint-based framework. (shrink)
In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved is logically underdetermined by experience. This view highlights the cues that are available in the input to children, as well as childrens skills (...) in extracting relevant information and forming generalizations on the basis of the data they receive. Nativists, on the other hand, contend that language-learners project beyond their experience in ways that the input does not even suggest. Instead of viewing language acqusition as a special case of theory induction, nativists posit a Universal Grammar, with innately specified linguistic principles of grammar formation. The nature versus nurture debate continues, as various poverty of stimulus arguments are challenged or supported by developments in linguistic theory and by findings from psycholinguistic investigations of child language. In light of some recent challenges to nativism, we rehearse old poverty-of stimulus arguments, and supplement them by drawing on more recent work in linguistic theory and studies of child language. (shrink)
In this paper we discuss a new perspective on the syntax-semantics interface. Semantics, in this new set-up, is not ‘read off’ from Logical Forms as in mainstream approaches to generativegrammar. Nor is it assigned to syntactic proofs using a Curry-Howard correspondence as in versions of the Lambek Calculus, or read off from f-structures using Linear Logic as in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG, Kaplan & Bresnan [9]). All such approaches are based on the idea that syntactic objects (trees, (...) proofs, fstructures) are somehow prior and that semantics must be parasitic on those syntactic objects. We challenge this idea and develop a grammar in which syntax and semantics are treated in a strictly parallel fashion. The grammar will have many ideas in common with the (converging) frameworks of categorial grammar and LFG, but its treatment of the syntax-semantics interface is radically different. Also, although the meaning component of the grammar is a version of Montague semantics and although there are obvious affinities between Montague’s conception of grammar and the work presented here, the grammar is not compositional, in the sense that composition of meaning need not follow surface structure. (shrink)
During the last thirty years, most linguists and philosophers have assumed that meaning can be represented symbolically and that the mental processing of language involves the manipulation of symbols. Scholars have assembled strong evidence that there must be linguistic representations at several abstract levels--phonological, syntactic, and semantic--and that those representations are related by a describable system of rules. Because meaning is so complex, linguists often posit an equally complex relationship between semantic and other levels of grammar. The Semantics of (...) Syntax is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories. (shrink)
" It is the connected presentation of Jespersen's views of the general principles of grammar based on years of studying various languages through both direct ...
In this book, a new theory of grammar based on word order is proposed: a deep word order as the multipartioned communicative-information structure of the ...
In this book, ten essays examine the contributions made to the issue of the philosophical significance of grammar by Frege, Russell, Bradley, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Carnap and Heidegger.
Abstract -/- Quantifier domain restriction (QDR) and two versions of nominal restriction (NR) are implemented as restrictions that depend on a previously introduced interpreter and interpretation time in a two-dimensional semantic framework on the basis of simple type theory and categorial grammar. Against Stanley (2002) it is argued that a suitable version of QDR can deal with superlatives like tallest. However, it is shown that NR is needed to account for utterances when the speaker intends to convey different restrictions (...) for multiple uses of the same quantifying determiner. We argue that NR generally fares better with such examples but also observe that examples like Every sailor waves at every sailor might be pragmatically anomalous. An account of contextual domain restriction is proposed that (i) excludes these anomalous readings (but it is shown how they could be included), (ii) makes it possible to express different contextual domain restrictions as long-range dependencies on an interpreter and an interpretation time, and (iii) additionally models restrictions based on locative constructions as general mereological constraints introduced by shifting the index. (shrink)
A central goal of modern generativegrammar has been to discover invariant properties of human languages that reflect “the innate schematism of mind that is applied to the data of experience” and that “might reasonably be attributed to the organism itself as its contribution to the task of the acquisition of knowledge” (Chomsky, 1971). Candidates for such invariances include the structure dependence of grammatical rules, and in particular, certain constraints on question formation. Various “poverty of stimulus” (POS) arguments (...) suggest that these invariances reflect an innate human endowment, as opposed to common experience: Such experience warrants selection of the grammars acquired only if humans assume, a priori, that selectable grammars respect substantive constraints. Recently, several researchers have tried to rebut these POS arguments. In response, we illustrate why POS arguments remain an important source of support for appeal to a priori structure-dependent constraints on the grammars that humans naturally acquire. (shrink)
Evidence is presented to show that the role of a generativegrammar of a natural language is not merely to generate the grammatical sentences of that language, but also to relate them to their logical forms. The notion of logical form is to be made sense of in terms a natural logic, a logical for natural language, whose goals are to express all concepts capable of being expressed in natural language, to characterize all the valid inferences that can (...) be made in natural language, and to mesh with adequate linguistic descriptions of all natural languages. The latter requirement imposes empirical linguistic constraints on natural logic. A number of examples are discussed. (shrink)
Since its formal definition over sixty years ago, category theory has been increasingly recognized as having a foundational role in mathematics. It provides the conceptual lens to isolate and characterize the structures with importance and universality in mathematics. The notion of an adjunction (a pair of adjoint functors) has moved to center-stage as the principal lens. The central feature of an adjunction is what might be called "internalization through a universal" based on universal mapping properties. A recently developed "heteromorphic" theory (...) of adjoint functors allows the concepts to be more easily applied empirically. This suggests a conceptual structure, albeit abstract, to model a range of selectionist mechanisms (e.g., in evolution and in the immune system). Closely related to adjoints is the notion of a "brain functor" which abstractly models structures of cognition and action (e.g., the generativegrammar view of language). (shrink)
Chomsky proposes a reformulation of the theory of transformational generativegrammar that takes recent developments in the descriptive analysis of particular ...
.................................................................................................... .................... 3 2. A Fregian Conception of Syntax/Semantics ....................................................................... 4 3. The Syntax/Semantics interface in GenerativeGrammar................................................... 7 3.1. Generative conceptions of grammar ............................................................................ 7 3.2. Building Strucures: External and Internal Merge ........................................................ 9 3.3. Notes on the literature.......................................................................................... ...... 12 4. A -language and the Interpretation of External and Internal Merge............................... 12 4.1. Logical Form................................................................................................ .............. 12 4.2. Syntax and Semantics of EL ...................................................................................... 13 4.3. Interpretations of External Merge.............................................................................. 15 4.4. Interpretation of Internal Merge................................................................................. 16 5. (...) The Two Most Important Rules of Construal: FI and QR ............................................... 17 5.1. QR resolves type-clashes ........................................................................................... 17 5.2. QR and Scope Ambiguities........................................................................................ 20 5.3. QR binds pronouns .................................................................................................... 21 6. Relative Clause and Quantifying into XP: The Empty Pronouns WH and PRO.............. 23 7. Intensional Contexts: The Type Language IL ................................................................... (shrink)
Cognitive science is, more than anything else, a pursuit of cognitive mechanisms. To make headway towards a mechanistic account of any particular cognitive phenomenon, a researcher must choose among the many architectures available to guide and constrain the account. It is thus fitting that this volume on contemporary debates in cognitive science includes two issues of architecture, each articulated in the 1980s but still unresolved:
• Just how modular is the mind? (section 1) – a debate initially pitting encapsulated (...) mechanisms (Fodorian modules that feed their ultimate outputs to a nonmodular central cognition) against highly interactive ones (e.g., connectionist networks that continuously feed streams of output to one another). • Does the mind process language-like representations according to formal rules? (this section) – a debate initially pitting symbolic architectures (such as Chomsky’s generative grammar or Fodor’s language of thought) against less language-like architectures (such as connectionist or dynamical ones).
Our project here is to consider the second issue within the broader context of where cognitive science has been and where it is headed. The notion that cognition in general—not just language processing—involves rules operating on language-like representations actually predates cognitive science. In traditional philosophy of mind, mental life is construed as involving propositional attitudes—that is, such attitudes towards propositions as believing, fearing, and desiring that they be true—and logical inferences from them. On this view, if a person desires that a proposition be true and believes that if she performs a certain action it will become true, she will make the inference and (absent any overriding consideration) perform the action. (shrink)
In this commentary, I concentrate upon Ray Jackendoff's view of the proper foundations for semantics within the context of generativegrammar. Jackendoff (2002) favors a form of internalism that he calls “conceptualism.” I argue that a retreat from realism to conceptualism is not only unwarranted, but even self-defeating, in that the issues that prompt his view will inevitably reappear if the latter is adopted.
Article history: This article sketches the Parallel Architecture, an approach to the structure of grammar that Accepted 29 August 2006 contrasts with mainstream generativegrammar (MGG) in that (a) it treats phonology, Available online 13 October 2006 syntax, and semantics as independent generative components whose structures are linked by interface rules; (b) it uses a parallel constraint-based formalism that is nondirectional; (c) Keywords: it treats words and rules alike as pieces of linguistic structure stored in long-term (...) memory. (shrink)
Noam Chomsky, the founding father of generativegrammar and the instigator of some of its core research programs, claims that linguistics is a part of psychology, concerned with a class of cognitive structures employed in speaking and understanding. In a recent book, Ignorance of Language, Michael Devitt has challenged certain core aspects of linguistics, as prominent practitioners of the science conceive of it. Among Devitt’s major conclusions is that linguistics is not a part of psychology. In this thesis (...) I defend Chomsky’s psychological conception of grammatical theory. My case for the psychological conception involves defending a set of psychological goals for generative grammars, centring on conditions of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. I argue that generativegrammar makes an explanatory commitment to a distinction between a psychological system of grammatical competence and the performance systems engaged in putting that competence to use. I then defend the view that this distinction can be investigated by probing speakers’ linguistic intuitions. Building on the psychological goals of generativegrammar and its explanatory commitment to a psychological theory of grammatical competence, I argue that generativegrammar neither targets nor presupposes non-psychological grammatical properties. The latter nonpsychological properties are dispensable to grammarians’ explanations because their explanatory goals can be met by the theory of grammatical competence to which they are committed. So generative grammars have psychological properties as their subject matter and linguistics is a part of psychology. (shrink)
In this paper, I argue that the temporal connective prima (‘before’) is a comparative adverb. The argument is based on a number of grammatical facts from Italian, showing that there is an asymmetry between prima and dopo (‘after’). On the ground of their divergent behaviour, I suggest that dopo has a different grammatical status from prima. I propose a semantic treatment for prima that is based on an independently motivated analysis of comparatives which can be traced back to Seuren (in: (...) Kiefer and Ruwet (eds.) Generativegrammar in Europe, 1973). Dopo is analyzed instead as an atomic two-place predicate which contributes a binary relation over events to the sentence meaning. The different semantic treatments of the two connectives provide an explanation for the grammatical asymmetries considered at the outset; interestingly, they also shed some light on other asymmetries between prima and dopo, which are known to hold for the English temporal connectives before and after as well: these asymmetries are related to the veridicality properties, the distribution of NPIs, and the logical properties of these connectives first described in Anscombe (Philos Rev 73:3–24, 1964). (shrink)
INTRODUCTION Linguists who work within the tradition of transformational generativegrammar tend to regard semantics as an intractable, perhaps ultimately ...
In this paper, Wittgenstein's philosophical approach and remarks are used to highlight features of pride that are not represented in contemporary psychological theories. Wittgenstein's scattered philosophical and autobiographical remarks on pride are arranged in order to engage with aspects of pride (e.g., as a self-conscious emotion) that can appear to have only empirical answers. Important themes to emerge in the resulting surview include the temptation to talk of pride as having or being a structure, the role of personal context in (...) understanding intense emotions, the difficulty of finding a referent for proud feelings, choices of words to convey or capture feelings, the possibility of further descriptions of one's inner experiences, bodily and immediate features of the experience of pride, and the need to reconcile occasional immediate bodily and behavioural manifestations of pride with the popular view of pride as a “thoughtful” emotion. The results suggest that new perspectives can emerge through assembling reminders of the everyday use of a concept and engaging with existing research. (shrink)
Since its formal definition over sixty years ago, category theory has been increasingly recognized as having a foundational role in mathematics. It provides the conceptual lens to isolate and characterize the structures with importance and universality in mathematics. The notion of an adjunction (a pair of adjoint functors) has moved to center-stage as the principal lens. The central feature of an adjunction is what might be called “determination through universals” based on universal mapping properties. A recently developed “heteromorphic” theory about (...) adjoints suggests a conceptual structure, albeit abstract and atemporal, for how new relatively autonomous behavior can emerge within a system obeying certain laws. The focus here is on applications in the life sciences (e.g., selectionist mechanisms) and human sciences (e.g., the generativegrammar view of language). (shrink)
It is the foundation of all traditional and modern analyses of Sanskrit, as well as having great historical and theoretical interest in its own right. Western grammatical theory has been influenced by it at every stage of its development for the last two centuries. The early 19th century comparativists learned from it the principles of morphological analysis. Bloomfield modeled both his classic Algonquian grammars and the logical-positivist axiomatization of his Postulates on it. Modern linguistics acknowledges it as the most complete (...)generativegrammar of any language yet written, and continues to adopt technical ideas from it. (shrink)
Introduction 1. Language and meaning Nothing is as easily overlooked, or as easily forgotten, as the most obvious truths. The tenet that language is a tool ...
Internalism is an explanatory strategy that makes the internal structure and constitution of the organism a basis for the investigation of its external function and the ways in which it is embedded in an environment. It is opposed to an externalist explanatory strategy, which takes its departure from observations about external function and mind-environment interactions, and infers and rationalizes internal organismic structure from that. This paper addresses the origins of truth, a basic ingredient in the human conceptual scheme. I suggest (...) the necessity of pursuing an internalist line of explanation for it, as adopted in the biolinguistic program and generativegrammar at large. According to this view, the concept of truth is a presupposition for the way language is used in relation to the world, rather than a function of that use or a consequence of language-world relations. (shrink)
Theorists have oversold the usefulness of predicate logic and generativegrammar to the study of language origins. They have searched for models that correspond to semantic properties, such as truth, when what is needed is an empirically testable model of evolution. Such a model is required if we are to explain the origins of linguistic properties by appealing to general properties of linguistic engendering, rather than to the advent of genotypes with the propensity to produce certain brain mechanisms. (...) While the latter sort of explanation has a place, no theory can be considered an `evolutionary' theory without the former. We introduce a general notion of engendering, whose primary virtue is its freedom from assumptions regarding the nature of colloquial change. We use it to frame a conjecture about the evolution of centre embedded clauses; one which makes the fewest possible assumptions about the neural requirements upon individual brains. Keywords: biology of language; epigenesis; engendering; evolution; mutation; population; recursion. (shrink)
I think that some of the arguments in this article are themselves flawed, or are based on an understanding of linguistics that is too narrowly focused on certain versions of generativegrammar. For example, the argument that in computational applications purely statistical approaches are in general more successful than rule-based approaches has to be qualified: It holds, or may have hold, for certain applications like machine translation, but not for others, like the generation of text to answer queries (...) to databases. Furthermore, statistical methods have been integrated in certain linguistic theories themselves, like stochastic optimality theory (Boersma & Hayes 2001). The authors also claim that linguistics is not able to come up with leading questions for the cognitive and neurophysiological investigation of language processing. This statement is even more puzzling, as it is difficult to name serious research in psycholinguistics or in neurophysiological aspects of language processing that is not informed by theoretical notions rooted in linguistics, many of them derived from generativegrammar. To cite just one case: Recursion has been proposed – perhaps unjustly so – as the single property that distinguishes human language processing from other animal communication systems; this has led to the identification of special brain regions and pathways of recursive language processing (cf. Friederici 2009). (shrink)
Fish abound in the pond Garlic reeked on his breath The pond abounds with fish His breath reeked with garlic Such sentences were first noted in Jespersen (1933), then were introduced in GenerativeGrammar by Fillmore (1968) and Anderson (1971). The most extensive treatment, from which some of the data below is taken, is Salkoff’s (1983) ”Bees are Swarming in the Garden”, Language 59.2, 288-346; cf. also Boons & Leclere (1976) (for discussion of the closely-parallel French data), and (...) see Levin (1993) for further references. For convenience in referring to the two kinds of sentences, I will adopt this terminology: Agent-Subject (A-Subject) Form: “Bees are swarming in the garden” Location-Subject (L-Subject) Form: “The garden is swarming with bees” The swarm-alternation (in which only intransitive verbs are found) should be distinguished carefully from the spray-load -alternation (which allows only transitive verbs). (shrink)
When one looks into the role of artificial languages in philosophy of language it seems appropriate to start with making a distinction between philosophy of language proper and formal semantics of natural language. Although the distinction between the two disciplines may not always be easy to make since there arguably exist substantial historical and systematic relationships between the two, it nevertheless pays to keep the two apart, at least initially, since the motivation commonly given for the use of artificial languages (...) in philosophy of language is often rather different from the one that drives the use of such languages in semantics. Of course, this difference in motivation should not blind us for the commonalities that exists between the two disciplines. Philosophy of language and formal semantics have a common history, and arguably also share some of their substance. Philosophy of language is by and large an outgrowth of work in the analytical tradition in philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Both ordinary language philosophy, with its emphasis on the description of actual language use, as well as the more logic-oriented and formally inclined school of logical positivism contributed to the definition of philosophy of language as a separate philosophical discipline, with its own set of problems and methods to solve them. Another major contributor to the establishment of philosophy of language as a distinct discipline has been modern linguistics, in particular generativegrammar in the tradition of Chomsky that became the dominant paradigm in linguisticsin the fifties and sixties of the previous century. And as it happens, both the generative tradition of Chomsky and analytic philosophy in its formal and less formal guises have been important factors in the development of formal semantics as well. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the two have something in common. That the communalities go beyond a common ancestry, but are reflected in substance and methods as well, will be argued later on. However, be that as it may, it is still a good idea to keep philosophy of language and formal semantics separate, at least initially, since the role that is assigned to artificial languages and the ways in which these languages are employed in both does differ in a number of respects that are worth keeping in mind.. (shrink)
