[lbo-talk] Challenge to Chomskyan Linguistics

Arash arash at riseup.net
Mon Apr 23 05:44:48 PDT 2007


Eubulides:

There's also a team at the Max Planck Institute that presented research at the AAAS meetings a couple of years ago that put some pretty huge nails in the coffin that's still being built.

Arash:

I think it is important to be clear on which of Chomsky's ideas is under criticism here. Not sure about this team's research, but Piraha's main relevance to Chomsky's views is that it puts into question whether recursion is a universal and essential part of language. A focus on recursion is at center of Chomsky's more recent work like the minimalist program, there is a greater consensus for his more basic hypothesis that language relies on innate mental structure specific to it.



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