This paper reviews an approach to the enterprise of paring away universals of attested languages to reveal the essential universals that require their own explanation. An example, discussed at this conference, is the long-standing puzzle presented by the Extended Projection Principle (EPP, Chomsky 1981). I am suggesting an explanation for the EPP based on the learner’s need for constructions to...

1 " I don't see any principled way to distinguish linguistics from neurolinguistics any more than one can distinguish chemistry from physical chemistry in principle. These may be useful distinctions for temporary purposes, but one looks forward to erosion of such boundaries as understanding progresses. My own view has always been that the part of the study of language relevant here is in princi...

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...

This paper argues that Principle A is not ‘an anywhere principle’, contrary to Belletti and Rizzi (1988) and much subsequent work, but must apply relatively late in derivations, perhaps at the end of each phase (Chomsky 2000). Evidence comes principally from the analysis of pseudo-gapping, in which the ellipsis remnant is extracted to a position outside of the VP which deletes. Anaphors cannot ...