Biolinguistics (E-Journal)
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Is Logic Innate?
No full textArguments are presented supporting logical nativism: the conjecture that humans have an innate logic faculty. In making a case for logical nativism, this article concentrates on children’s acquisition of the logical concept of disjunction. Despite the widespread belief to the contrary, the interpretation of disjunction in human languages is arguably the same as it is in classical logic, namely inclusive–or. The argument proceeds with empirical support for the view that the inclusive–or is the meaning of disjunction in human languages, from studies of child language development and from cross-linguistic research. Evidence is presented showing that young children adhere to universal semantic principles that characterize adult linguistic competence across languages. Several a priori arguments are also offered in favour of logical nativism. These arguments show that logic, like Socratic virtue and like certain aspects of language, is not learned and cannot be taught — thus supporting a strong form of innateness
Adjunction, Labeling, and Bare Phrase Structure
No full textThe primary aim in this paper is to propose a phrase structure for adjunction that is compatible with the precepts of Bare Phrase Structure (BPS). Current accounts are at odds with the central vision of BPS and current practice leans more to descriptive eclecticism than to theoretical insight. A diagnosis for this conceptual disarray is suggested here: It stems from a deeply held though seldom formulated intuition; the tacit view that adjuncts are the abnormal case while arguments describe the grammatical norm. In actuality, it is argued, adjuncts are so well behaved that they require virtually no grammatical support to function properly. Arguments, in contrast, are refractory and require grammatical aid to allow them to make any propositional contribution. This last remark should come as no surprise to those with neo-Davidsonian semantic sympathies. Connoisseurs of this art form are well versed in the important role that grammatical (aka, thematic) roles play in turning arguments into
modifiers of events. Such fulcra are not required for meaningfully integrating adjuncts.
into sentences. In what follows, we take this difference to be of the greatest significance
and we ask ourselves what this might imply for the phrase structure of adjunction
Minimalist Meaning, Internalist Interpretation
No full textThis article offers a conception of semantics, and of what makes the human language faculty distinctive, based on five theses: Meanings are instructions to build concepts; concatenation calls for conjunction of monadic concepts; grammatical relations invoke certain thematic relations and a kind of existential closure; lexicalization is a partly creative process of abstraction; and meanings are internalistic properties of expressions. Each of these claims is defended elsewhere. The aim here is to connect them explicitly, and compare the result with alternatives, in the hope of providing a plausible conception of natural language meaning that coheres with Chomsky’s minimalist program
Bare Phrase Structure and Specifier-less Syntax
No full textIt is pointed out that “specifiers” render the algorithm of projection overly complex. This consideration lends support to Starke’s (2004) reanalysis of specifiers as phrasal heads that project their own phrases — which makes phrase structure a simple sequence of head-complement relations. It is further pointed out that if head-complement relations are represented using dominance in place of sisterhood, to reflect the essentially asymmetrical nature of Merge (Chomsky 2000), a non-branching (partially linear) phrase structure tree is obtained that very naturally eliminates labels and projections. A simple Spell-Out rule then provides a linear ordering of the terminal elements. The linear tree preserves all the major results of antisymmetry
