This paper gives a brief overview of some of the primary arguments for Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001). Radical Construction Grammar is a theory of syntactic representation which is compatible with—in fact, I believe, is a consequence of—the facts of the grammars of human languages. In fact, Radical Construction Grammar proposes an extremely minimalist model of syntax from a universal...

We report a computational study on the CHILDES database for learning a word grammar of Turkish nouns. The syllable-based model converges to a morpheme-based model in terms of overlaps in the set of lexical hypotheses. Morphology is a hidden variable in all models, and the search problem for hypotheses is narrowed down by a probabilistic conception of universal grammar à la Combinatory Categoria...

In a recent paper [Lidz, J., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (2003). Understanding how input matters: Verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar. Cognition, 87, 151–178], we provided crosslinguistic evidence in favor of the following linked assertions: (i) Verb argument structure is a correlate of verb meaning; (ii) However, argument structure is not directly available to learners as a c...

There are many logical possibilities for marking morphological features. However only some of them are attested in languages of the world, and out of them some are more frequent than others. For example, it has been observed (Sapir, 1921; Greenberg, 1957; Hawkins & Gilligan, 1988) that inflectional morphology tends to overwhelmingly involve suffixation rather than prefixation. This paper propos...

A new framework for the study of the human moral faculty is currently receiving much attention: the so-called 'universal moral grammar' framework. It is based on an intriguing analogy, first pointed out by Rawls, between the study of the human moral sense and Chomsky's research program into the human language faculty. To assess UMG, we ask: is moral competence modular? Does it have an underlyin...

ConTroll is a grammar development system which supports the implementation of current constraint-based theories. It uses strongly typed feature structures as its principal data structure and offers definite relations, universal constraints, and lexical rules to express grammar constraints. The aspects of ConTroll of relevance to the development of large grammars are discussed in detail. The sys...

Findings from the field of experimental linguistics have shown that a native speaker may judge a variant that is part of her grammar as unacceptable, but still use it productively in spontaneous speech. The process of eliciting acceptability judgments from speakers of non-standard languages is sometimes clouded by factors akin to prescriptive notions of grammatical correctness. It has been argu...

Can concepts from the theory of neural computation contribute to formal theories of the mind? Recent research has explored the implications of one principle of neural computation, optimization, for the theory of grammar. Optimization over symbolic linguistic structures provides the core of a new grammatical architecture, optimality theory. The proposition that grammaticality equals optimality s...

A critical study of the arguments for and against the hypothesis that human beings are born with an innate universal grammar, with some brief discussions of alternative theories.