The class of regular languages can be generated from the regular expressions. These regular expressions, however, do not themselves form a regular language, as can be seen using the pumping lemma. On the other hand, the class of enumerable languages can be enumerated by a universal language that is one of its elements. We say that the enumerable languages are reflexive. In this paper we investi...

Chomsky [Chomsky, N., 1965. Aspects of The Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass; Chomsky, N., 1986. Knowledge of Language: its Nature, Origin, and Use. Praeger, New York] presents a series of arguments for an innate syntactic component of the language faculty. Do the arguments proposed at that time still stand, or have they been overridden by newer proposals? The current paper emphasize...

Recent work exploring the evolution of human language (Berwick and Chomsky 2011; Chomsky 2005, 2007, 2010) presents the view that it is a one-time event that yielded unbounded Merge, with externalization of language as a subsequent secondary process that does not involve a genomic change. This hypothesis is embedded in the following version of the strong minimalist thesis (SMT) formulated by Ch...

0. Introduction In developing generative theories of syntax the challenge has long been to reconcile two opposite kinds of empirical evidence. On the one hand, there is substantial evidence that languages of the world are deeply similar; on the other, there is also substantial evidence that they differ on the surface. For example, there are languages which allow sentences without a pronounced s...