The Chomskyan revolution in linguistics in the 1950s in essence turned linguistics into a branch of cognitive science (and ultimately biology) by both changing the linguistic landscape and forcing a radical change in cognitive science to accommodate linguistics as many of us conceive of it today. More recently Chomsky has advanced the boldest version of his naturalistic approach to language by ...

The approach to generative grammar originating with Chomsky (1957) has been enormously successful within linguistics. Seeing such success, one wonders whether a similar approach might help us understand other human domains besides language. One such domain is morality. Could there be universal generative moral grammar? More specifically, might it be useful to moral theory to develop an explicit...

By the notion "bound focus", we mean phonological prominence and semantic affectedness that is dependent on the presence of a focus-demanding lexical element such as only or even. This paper tries to demonstrate that modem conceptions of syntactic theory such as the Minimalist Program explain in a natural way the various word orders that can be observed. Crucial use is made of the idea that foc...

Below are some brief discussions of some issues which arise if we take up the proposal in (1) and (2), pointing out some difficulties and areas for future research. The discussion will be set against a backdrop of recent proposals within the “Minimalist Program” set out in Chomsky (1993, et seq.), particularly those involving Attract-F, which are sketched below. Note that (1) and (2) was propos...

This thesis provides an analysis of scrambling, following the Minimalist program of Chomsky 1992, examining Hindi as a case study and occasionally making comparisons with Japanese. The first major claim is that there are two kinds of operations that yield scrambling. One type, called outer scrambling, is an operator-variable construction and is the result of movement. The other type, called Inn...

I argue that the shift of explanatory burden from the generator to the evaluator in OT syntax – together with the difficulties that arise when we try to formulate a working theory of the interfaces of syntax – leads to a number of assumptions about syntactic structures in OT which are quite different from those typical of minimalist syntax: formal features, as driving forces behind syntactic mo...

Our ultimate concern is the mapping between representations in the Language of Thought (in the sense of Fodor 1975) and representations at LF in some version of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995). We argue on a variety of grounds that such a mapping is direct and that both these levels of representation must meet the (same) condition of compositionality. We argue that Copy theory, in particu...