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New theoretical syntax paper with Jae-Young shim on the status of categorial labeling and copies in Linguistic Research. PDF “In contrast to dominant views that the labeling algorithm (LA) detects (i) only the structurally highest copy of a moved object, or (ii) detects all copies, we propose and defend a third option: (iii) all copies
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Scientific understanding can be roughly defined – as Chomsky once said – as a convergence between properties of the mind and properties of the world. What form does this convergence take? Heisenberg is supposed to have said to Einstein that ‘If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty … to forms that no
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New paper published in Glossa on the ancient debate of whether language is optimally designed for cognition or communication. Language design and communicative competence: The minimalist perspective “In the Minimalist Program, the place of linguistic communication in language evolution and design is clear: It is assumed to be secondary to internalisation. I will defend this
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Sergio Balari and Guillermo Lorenzo have a paper in the current volume of Biolinguistics, which is dedicated to celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lenneberg’s Biological Foundations of Language. The paper includes a number of unusual claims about computational approaches to neurobiology which I want to briefly address here. They begin their discussion of neuolinguistics by
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Cedric Boeckx has a new paper out in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, “A conjecture about the neural basis of recursion in light of descent with modification”. The central thesis is summarised as follows: “I argue that the expansion of the parietal region associated with the globularization of the neurocranium in our species contributed to the
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New paper published in Biolinguistics on the nature of pragmatic unarticulated constituents and the syntax-semantics interface. “This paper explores the prospect that grammatical expressions are propositionally whole and psychologically plausible, leading to the explanatory burden being placed on syntax rather than pragmatic processes, with the latter crucially bearing the feature of optionality. When supposedly unarticulated
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Boeckx and Theofanopoulou (2015) today produced a commentary on ‘Labels, Cognomes and Cyclic Computation: An Ethological Perspective’ (Murphy 2015a; henceforth LCC). With care and instructive insights into the life sciences they expand the discussion of the computational capacities of non-humans, and note that the discussion of brain dynamics (the ‘dynome’; Koppell et al. 2014) in
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In a recent paper, ‘Naturalism without metaphysics’, philosopher John Collins notes that scientific naturalism does not have to be a metaphysical position, and in fact any serious naturalist must suppose that their metaphysics reaches only as far as their theoretical constructs. This methodological naturalism is therefore ‘an antimetaphysical doctrine’. Science proceeds on whatever course it
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Elliot Murphy 