Transformational learning, according to Mezirow (1981), involves transforming taken-for-granted frames of reference into more discriminating, flexible ‘habits of mind’. In teacher education, transformative learning impacts on the development of students’ action theories, self-efficacy and professional attributes. Although considered imperative to reflective practice, not all students take a tra...

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...

Sentential adverbs are often assumed to be situated in front of the verb phrase in arbitrary order. In a recent monograph, however, Cinque (1999) claims that the relative order of sentential adverbs may, in principle, be universally fixed. In this paper I first give a brief presentation of Cinque’s proposal. Then I present a pilot study of sentential adverbs in English and Swedish. This study i...

What makes a language a natural language? A longstanding tradition in generative grammar holds that a language is natural just in case it is learnable under a constellation of auxiliary assumptions about input evidence available to children. Yet another approach seeks some key mathematical property that distinguishes the natural languages from all possible symbol-systems. With some exceptions f...

Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral judgments. As a theoretical hypothesis, LA thus r...

To begin to take steps to a mental ecology of emergence we first establish twofundamental assumptions from the methodology of transformational grammar—thecentrality of human judgment based on direct experience and the proposition that thesystematic nature of human behavior is algorithmically driven. We then set a doublecriterion for understanding any formalism such as emergence:...

In this note we define a machine that generates nests. The basic relations commonly attributed to linguistic expressions in configurational syntactic models as well as the device of chains postulated in current transformational grammar to represent distance relations can be naturally derived from the assumption that the combinatorial syntactic procedure is a nesting machine. Accordingly, the co...

In the Bock & Levelt (1994) model of language production, trees are conceptualized as ‘control hierarchies’ that coordinate the insertion of lexical material into slots once the material is retrieved and assembled. This mainstream view of production has encouraged researchers to regard the acoustic correlates of prosody, such as final lengthening and pausing, as reflective of the existence of h...

The accuracy of statistical parsing models can be improved with the use of lexical information. Statistical parsing using Lexicalized tree adjoining grammar (LTAG), a kind of lexicalized grammar, has remained relatively unexplored. We believe that is largely in part due to the absence of large corpora accurately bracketed in terms of a perspicuous yet broad coverage LTAG. Our work attempts to a...