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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Interfaces + Recursion = Language?: Chomsky's Minimalism and the View from Syntax-Semantics

Interfaces + Recursion = Language?: Chomsky's Minimalism and the View from Syntax-Semantics

Sauerland, Uli
Gärtner, Hans-Martin

Hardcover

Series: Studies in Generative Grammar [Sgg], Book 89

Grammar & StyleLinguistics

Publisher Price: $210.00

ISBN10: 3110188724
ISBN13: 9783110188721
Publisher: de Gruyter Mouton
Published: May 18 2007
Pages: 295
Weight: 1.20
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.30 Depth: 9.20
Language: English

Human language is a phenomenon of immense richness: It provides finely nuanced means of expression that underlie the formation of culture and society; it is subject to subtle, unexpected constraints like syntactic islands and cross-over phenomena; different mutually-unintelligeable individual languages are numerous; and the descriptions of individual languages occupy thousands of pages. Recent work in linguistics, however, has tried to argue that despite all appearances to the contrary, the human biological capacity for language may be reducible to a small inventory of core cognitive competencies. The most radical version of this view has emerged from the Minimalist Program: The claim that language consists of only the ability to generate recursive structures by a computational mechanism. On this view, all other properties of language must result from the interaction at the interfaces of that mechanism and other mental systems not exclusively devoted to language. Since language could then be described as the simplest recursive system satisfying the requirements of the interfaces, one can speak of the Minimalist Equation: Interfaces + Recursion = Language.

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