CURRICULUM VITAE David Pesetsky ADDRESS
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Three Factors in Language Design Noam Chomsky
Three Factors in Language Design Noam Chomsky The biolinguistic perspective regards the language faculty as an ‘‘organ of the body,’’ along with other cognitive systems. Adopting it, we expect to find three factors that interact to determine (I-) languages attained: genetic endowment (the topic of Universal Grammar), experi- ence, and principles that are language- or even organism-independent. Research has naturally focused on I-languages and UG, the problems of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. The Principles-and-Param- eters approach opened the possibility for serious investigation of the third factor, and the attempt to account for properties of language in terms of general considerations of computational efficiency, eliminat- ing some of the technology postulated as specific to language and providing more principled explanation of linguistic phenomena. Keywords: minimalism, principled explanation, Extended Standard Theory, Principles-and-Parameters, internal/external Merge, single- cycle derivation, phase Thirty years ago, in 1974, an international meeting took place at MIT, in cooperation with the Royaumont Institute in Paris, on the topic of ‘‘biolinguistics,’’ a term suggested by the organizer, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, and the title of a recent book surveying the field and proposing new directions by Lyle Jenkins (2002).1 This was only one of many such interactions in those years, including interdisciplinary seminars and international conferences. The biolinguistic perspective began to take shape over 20 years before in discussions among a few graduate students who were much influenced by developments in biology and mathematics in the early postwar years, including work in ethology that was just coming to be known in the United States. -
Evidence and Argumentation: a Reply to Everett (2009)*
DISCUSSION NOTE Evidence and argumentation: A reply to Everett (2009)* ANDREW NEVINS DAVID PESETSKY CILENE RODRIGUES Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of University of Brasilia and Technology Emmanuel College This discussion note is a brief response to Everett (2009, E09), which was a reply to our assessment (Nevins, Pesetsky, & Rodrigues 2009, NP&R) of Everett’s (2005, CA) earlier claims about the Amazonian language Piraha˜. An important (and somewhat hidden) feature of E09 is a set of new empirical assertions presented in defense of CA’s hypothesis that Piraha˜ lacks embedding. We argue that these new claims have not been supported by appropriate evidence; but if they are correct nonetheless, they WEAKEN rather than strengthen the case against embedding. We conclude with a discussion of comparable questions of argumentation and evidence that arise elsewhere in E09, and the relevance of these issues to the public discussion of CA’s claims. 1. GOALS OF THIS REPLY. One of our reasons for undertaking the project reported in NP&R was the extraordinary attention that Everett’s claims about Piraha˜ have re- ceived in the popular press—and the equally extraordinary significance that has been attributed to them. The New Scientist (March 18, 2006) suggested, for example, that Piraha˜ might constitute ‘the final nail in the coffin for Noam Chomsky’s hugely influen- tial theory of universal grammar’; and the Chicago Tribune (June 10, 2007), under the headline ‘Shaking language to the core’, reported that Everett had ‘fired a volley straight at the theory when he reported that the Brazilian tribe he was studying didn’t use recursives [sic]’. -
Head Movement in Linguistic Theory Ora Matushansky
Head Movement in Linguistic Theory Ora Matushansky In this article, I address the issue of head movement in current linguistic theory. I propose a new view of the nature of heads and head movement that reveals that head movement is totally compliant with the stan- dardly suggested properties of grammar. To do so, I suggest that head movement is not a single syntactic operation, but a combination of two operations: a syntactic one (movement)and a morphological one (m-merger). I then provide independent motivation for m-merger, ar- guing that it can be attested in environments where no head movement took place. Keywords: head movement, c-selection, Agree, Merge, Head Move- ment Constraint, cyclicity 1 Introduction In order to consider issues of head movement in linguistic theory, we must first have a definition of a head. The standard Principles-and-Parameters view, repeated in Chomsky 1994, is that a head is defined as a terminal node (which automatically entails that in order to be distinguished from terminals, nonterminal nodes must contain information other than what heads contain). However, once we consider the impact of the Distributed Morphology framework (Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994, Marantz 1993), according to which morphological structure is composed in syntax, does terminal mean ‘syntactically indivisible’ (atomic)or ‘merged from the lexicon/ numeration as a single feature bundle and/or a single lexical item’? While in systems where feature bundles are inserted as is there is no difference between the two notions, the exact definition plays a role when it comes to derived heads (i.e., heads arising as a result of head movement)in the Distributed Morphology framework.