Human language is a unique faculty of the mind. It has been the ultimate mystery throughout the history of neuroscience. Despite many aphasia and functional imaging studies, the exact correlation between cortical language areas and subcomponents of the linguistic system has not been established. One notable drawback is that most functional imaging studies have tested language tasks at the word ...

There are currently two theories about how children acquire a language. The first is generative grammar, according to which all human children innately possess a universal grammar, abstract enough to structure any language of the world. Acquisition then consists of two processes: (1) acquiring all the words, idioms, and quirky constructions of the particular language being learned (by ‘normal’ ...

Many convergence points have been observed during the recent years between the Minimalist Program and the program of Categorial Grammar, above all since the formalization of minimalist ideas by E. Stabler. For instance, the Merge-operation is exactly like functional application. Moreover the fundamental operation of feature-checking, which is at the basis of the Move-operation, can really be de...

0. Introduction The status of functional categories in early child language has been a subject of debate for much of the last decade (Hyams 1986, Radford 1990, Platzack 1992, Rizzi 1993, Wexler 1994). In general, proponents of the ‘No Functional Categories’ position claim that production data from early child language clearly demonstrates that the differences between child language and adult la...

Well-attested cross-linguistically the phenomenon appears to be constrained – not every possible intermixing of a pair of languages is allowed within a sentence. However, a certain amount of variation in CS patterns has already been documented cross-linguistically. A satisfactory account of CS thus raises (at least) the following theoretical questions: First, can an account be provided in terms...

The study investigates the relationship between input, UG parameter values, and the native language in the acquisition of a purely semantic property that is superficially unrelated to its syntactic trigger, The Bare Noun/Proper Name parameter. A bidirectional study of the two properties was conducted. In the English Italian direction, the lack of one native interpretation in the target language...

Jerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with "artificial selection" by animal breeders was misleading and evolutionary explanation is nothing but post-hoc historical ...

It is generally agreed upon that, in first language (L1) acquisition, the child, provided with ample primary linguistic data, relies on a Universal Grammar (UG) from which it selects the functional categories and features necessary to parse the input. Although the learning task for adult second language (L2) learners is not necessarily different from that of the L1 child, important differences,...

Birdsong's highly informative overview of the theoretical issues and facts on age and second language acquisition (L2A) has made me realize again how deceptively appealing it is to put two and two together in this overall discussion of age and acquisition. Let me explain what I mean by this temptation. If one takes the view that the goal of linguistic theory is to seek an explanation for the pr...

We present a recently proposed theory of grammar, Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1991, 1993). The principles of OT derive in large part from the high-level principles governing computation in connectionist networks. The talk proceeds as follows: (1) we summarize OT and its applications to UG. The we present (2) learning and (3) parsing algorithms for OT. Finally, (4) we show how cruc...