The biolinguistic perspective regards the language faculty as an ‘‘organ of the body,’’ along with other cognitive systems. Adopting it, we expect to find three factors that interact to determine (I-) languages attained: genetic endowment (the topic of Universal Grammar), experience, and principles that are languageor even organism-independent. Research has naturally focused on I-languages and ...

Of ongoing interest within generative grammar is the proper treatment of language variation in terms of parameters. One important recent question concerns the existence of macro-parameters. Baker (2008) outlines three ways to determine whether a parameter is macro or not, one of which relates to the size of effect, or impact of a parameter. The greater the size of effect, or impact a parameter ...

The central problem for the linguistic theory, often referred to as Plato's problem, is how children are able to acquire language despite the impoverished nature of the linguistic data they are exposed to. The Principles and Parameters approach provides a viable solution to Plato's problem. The basic idea is that children are biologically endowed with a set of principles, which are invariant ac...

We describe a non-parametric method to reconstruct gas density and temperature profiles of galaxy clusters from observations of X-ray surface brightness, emissionweighted temperature and the y-parameter through the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. This method is based on the inversion of the projected profiles under the spherically symmetric approximation, which is independent of the equation of stat...

Newmeyer (2004) argues that the notion of parameter of Universal Grammar has no role to play in accounting for cross-linguistic differences in syntax, and that, instead, “language-particular differences are captured by differences in language-particular rules” (183). He tries to show that parameter-approaches “have failed to live up to their promise” (181) and that “the hopeful vision of UG as ...

We stud y th e amount of ti me needed to learn a fixed t raining se t in the "back-pro pagation" proced ure for learning in multi-layer neural network models. The task chosen was 32-bit parity, a highorder funct ion for wh ich memorization of specific inpu t-output pairs is necessary. For small t raining sets , the learning time is consistent with a ~-power law depen dence on the number of patt...

Universal Grammar (UG) proposed by Chomsky (1986) has gained a large popularity in linguistics study. The paper firstly illustrates the background and major contents of UG and second language acquisition (SLA). Then it addresses the three hypotheses of UG in SLA, which center on whether adult language learners have access to the principles and parameters of UG in constructing the grammar of a s...

Massive actuator arrays found their applications in robotics, pharmaceutics, aerospace, etc. Compared with electrically and/or pneumatically powered actuator array, hydraulic actuator has the comprehensive advantages of higher force density (i.e. force / actuation area), better controllability, and simpler remote control accessibility. This paper presents approaches to construct and control a m...