In 1975, in an old abbey in Royaumont, France, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini gathered linguists, philosophers, psychologists and computationalists for the first biolinguistics get-together to discuss what the linguistics of the period told us about the structure of the mind/brain. The participants defended two contrasting viewpoints. One group, centered on Piaget's work, claimed that language mas...

I develop a view of the common factor between subjectively indistinguishable perceptions and hallucinations that avoids analyzing experiences as involving awareness relations to abstract entities, sense-data, or any other peculiar entities. The main thesis is that hallucinating subjects employ concepts (or analogous nonconceptual structures), namely the very same concepts that in a subjectively...

Abstract In linguistic communication, the speaker’s utterance simultaneously generates several levels of meaning related to Grice’s distinction between what is said and implicated. Yet, there a lively debate about two notions. This study gives general overview three schools: Semantic Minimalism, Radical Contextualism, Moderate Contextualism. After surveying current controversies in these theori...

This short paper presents a system developed at the Université Paris 13 for the Semeval 2007 Metonymy Resolution Task (task #08, location name track; see Markert and Nissim, 2007). The system makes use of plain word forms only. In this paper, we evaluate the accuracy of this minimalist approach, compare it to a more complex one which uses both syntactic and semantic features, and discuss its us...

Hornstein (1999, 2001) proposes a particular version of the movement theory of control (MTC) in which movement is driven by the need of a DP to “receive” a θ-feature from the predicate it merges with. I argue here against the use of θ-features in syntax on various grounds, the most important of which is that, being fundamentally semantic in nature, they belong properly to the bare output condit...