Although linguistic nativism has received the bulk of attention in contemporary innateness debates, moral nativism has perhaps an even deeper ancestry. If linguistic nativism is Cartesian, moral nativism is Platonic. Moral nativism has taken a backseat to linguistic nativism in contemporary discussions largely because Chomsky made a case for linguistic nativism characterized by unprecedented ri...

espanolEn este articulo, por medio de un acercamiento la historia intelectual, se analiza el surgimiento figura intelectual en Francia con “Affaire” o caso Dreyfus para entender las posturas Jean-Paul Sartre, quien sobresale los intelectuales del siglo xx y fue clave desde posguerra hasta finales anos sesenta. Luego analizan matices compromiso Noam Chomsky como investigador, convirtio critico p...

One of the fundamental issues in the design of linguistic theory concerns the overall complexity of the grammar. By Occam’s razor, given two competing grammars (or theories) of equal descriptive power, the one that is less complex should be preferred. Since the beginnings of generative linguistics, a number of principles and constraints have been devised in order to keep this complexity to the ...

In this article I propose an alternative account of expletive THERE based on the theory that formal features may move overtly at PF. Specifically, I argue that the «inadequacies» of expletive THERE alluded to in Chomsky (1993: 33) are the result of the fact that THERE is simply a collection of formal features, an «alternative» spell-out of the Case and Agreement features of a lexical NP and has...

Developing linguistic resources (such as lexica, grammars etc.) that can be used both in parsing and in generation is an extremely difficult task. Nonetheless, thinking about this option is useful in order to highlight properties of the linguistic competence that seem to be cognitively motivated. The standard minimalist approach (Chomsky 1995-2001) sketches a model that does not fit in any clea...

Herman & Chomsky (1988) have developed a propaganda model to explain why some subjects are preferably dealt with by the news media whereas no attention is paid to others. An essential criterion for this is the usefulness of a topic. Herman & Chomsky, therefore, refer to "worthy" und "unworthy victims": victims of national or international violence, whose torments, though comparable from an obje...