Neste texto, faz-se uma rápida apresentação do autor (James Harris), de sua obra principal (Hermes, a philosophical inquiry concerning universal grammar), alguns aspectos da recepção que teve seus contemporâneos e, finalmente, algumas características centrais Hermes, o singularizam no contexto pensamento gramatical setecentista.

The absence of negative universal determiners in natural languages expressing “not all” has given rise to various speculations, ranging from an innate principle of grammar to blocking on the basis of pragmatic principles. After arguing that these proposals are flawed, I propose that there are no general principles standing in the way of such determiners, but that the two main processes which di...

Language is a biological trait that radically changed the performance of one species and the appearance of the planet. Understanding how human language came about is one of the most interesting tasks for evolutionary biology. Here we discuss how natural selection can guide the emergence of some basic features of human language, including arbitrary signs, words, syntactic communication and gramm...

Recent advances in genetics and neurobiology have greatly increased the degree of variation that one finds in what is taken to provide the biological foundations of our species-specific linguistic capacities. In particular, this variation seems to cast doubt on the purportedly homogeneous nature of the language faculty traditionally captured by the concept of "Universal Grammar." In this articl...

Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) is a lexicalized grammar formalism in which words are associated with categories that, in combination with a small universal set of rules, specify the syntactic configurations in which they may occur. Previous work has shown that learning sequence models for CCG tagging can be improved by using priors that are sensitive to the formal properties of CCG as wel...

A controversial claim in linguistics is that children face an induction problem, which is often used to motivate the need for Universal Grammar. English anaphoric one has been argued to present this kind of induction problem. While the original solution was that children have innate domain-specific knowledge about the structure of language, more recent studies have suggested alternative solutio...

The paperpresents a computationally tractable application of Bulgarian pronouns representation using Universal Networking Language (UNL) formalism. It analyses grammar features of pronouns and offers a model of their formal representation based on incorporation of grammar, semantic and lexical knowledge by using standard UNL knowledge representation mechanisms. Also a comparison of different ap...

Phonological sensitivity to lexical class has been addressed in the literature; at least two sets of hypotheses have been advanced regarding its codification in grammar. The first type of approach holds that lexical class differences are limited by restrictions in the design of grammar itself (or more specifically, Universal Grammar): for example, it has been hypothesized that only faithfulness...

Human infants develop language remarkably rapidly and without overt instruction. We argue that the distinctive ontogenesis of child language arises from the interplay of three factors: domain-specific principles of language (Universal Grammar), external experience, and properties of non-linguistic domains of cognition including general learning mechanisms and principles of efficient computation...

This paper reviews arguments against the evolutionary plausibility of a traditional genetically specified universal grammar. We argue that no such universal grammar could have evolved, either by a process of natural selection or by other evolutionary mechanisms. Instead, we propose that the close fit between languages and language learners, which make language acquisition possible, arises not b...