It is in LSLT, first circulated in 1955, that Chomsky sets out in more detail the theory of generative grammar. In this work "the 'realist' position" is assumed. The theory is "understood as a psychological theory that attempts to characterize the innate human 'language faculty'" (Chomsky 1975:37). Hence from its earliest beginnings the central motivation for the study of generative grammar (ge...

Chomsky (1957) o ered prescient suggestions about how to formulate theories of understanding for the spoken languages that human children can naturally acquire. We can view his proposal as a prolegomenon to a theory of meaning that combines a layered theory of syntax with an account of how humans can naturally use expressions in acts of referring, asserting, querying, and so on; cp. Austin (196...

Within the Principles-and-Parameters approach to UG (including the recent Minimalist Program), the process of language acquisition is interpreted as the process of fixing the values of parameters in one of the permissible ways (see e.g. Chomsky 1995:6). Under this view, the data from child language can (in principle) be especially valuable, in evaluating the parameters proposed through the inve...

In this paper, we prove decidability properties and new results on the position of the family of languages generated by (circular) splicing systems within the Chomsky hierarchy. The two main results of the paper are the following. First, we show that it is decidable, given a circular splicing language and a regular language, whether they are equal. Second, we prove the language generated by an ...

The central claim of the paper is that NL stringsets are regular. Three independent arguments are offered in favor of this position: one based on parsimony considerations, one employing the McCullogh-Pitts (1943) model of neurons, and a purely linguistic one. It is possible to derive explicit upper bounds for the number of (live) states in NL acceptors: the results show that finite state NL par...

In this paper, we demonstrate how a revised theory of coreference relations that relies on independently motivated elements of Phase Theory (Chomsky 2001, Chomsky 2004) predicts these empirically tested grammaticality judgments. 1. Background Our analysis assumes a version of Phase Theory (Chomsky 2001, Chomsky 2004). In Phase Theory, a derivation proceeds in phases, and the complement of a pha...

O presente artigo foi elaborado a partir do debate entre Noam Chomsky e Richard Herstein sobre os limites da pesquisa científica as questões éticas inerentes à atividade de científica. A questão norteadora que permeia o busca responder: atuação pesquisador deveria ser ilimitada mesmo em pesquisas no qual conclusão irá causar impacto social negativo supera benefícios pesquisa? análise textual le...