Boškovi (1997a), (1997b), (in press a), (in press b) showed that Superiority effects (cf. Chomsky (1973)) may be taken as a diagnostic for wh-movement in multiple whquestions, that is, movement of a wh-phrase to Spec-CP, if one adopts the minimalist framework of Chomsky (1995b). In this framework, movement is subject to derivational economy, realized in conditions such as Minimal Link (MLC). In...

The earliest generative work derived all nominalizations syntactically (Chomsky 1955-6, Lees 1960). Chomsky (1970) then argued that only -ing gerunds are derived syntactically, while all other types of event nominals, such as refutation, acceptance, refusal, are derived morphologically in the lexicon from bases that are unspecified between nouns and verbs. The suffix -ing was shown to serve bot...

The outcome of scientific research depends on how a phenomenon is viewed and how the questions are phrased. This applies also to the nativist view of language acquisition. As a complement to MacWhinney’s discussion of nativism from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology, I would like to devote this commentary to the question of the title from the viewpoint of computational linguistics. Formally,...