Introduction

2016 ◽  
pp. xxii-34
Author(s):  
Ian Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Grammatical Knowledge ◽  
Language Faculty ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
Language Universals ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Genetically Determined ◽  
Animal Language

This introductory chapter tries to set the chapters to follow in a general background, and to link them together. The first part begins by clarifying what is meant by Universal Grammar (UG), first distinguishing grammar from logic and then UG from a group of related concepts (biolinguistics, the language faculty, competence, I-language, generative grammar, language universals, and metaphysical universals). This leads to a clearer definition of UG as the general theory of I-languages, taken to be constituted by a subset of the set of possible generative grammars, and as such characterizes the genetically determined aspect of the human capacity for grammatical knowledge. The remaining sections introduce each of the five parts of the volume: the philosophical background to UG, linguistic theory, language acquisition, comparative syntax, and a number of wider issues ranging from creoles to animal language.

scholarly journals Chomsky's Contribution to Linguistics: A Review

2018 ◽  
Vol I (I) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Sonia Touqir ◽  
Amna Mushtaq ◽  
Touqir Nasir
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Language Faculty ◽  
Acquisition Process ◽  
Principles And Parameters

This review seeks to highlight Chomsky's major contributions to the field of linguistics. He changed linguists' conception about the nature of language from an externalized to internalized approach. This shift also resulted in the language being thought of as a cognitive phenomenon rather than as a set of structures to be analyzed for their correctness or incorrectness to prove his stance introduced the concept of language faculty, its workings, Universal Grammar, Principles and Parameters, and Transformational and Generative Grammar. The TGG also significantly overhauled the existent phrase structure rules. These rules were brought to follow binarity principles that dictated that a node cannot have less than or more than two branches. Besides the concept of Universal Grammar, along with its principles and parameters, Chomsky simplified how the language acquisition process can be understood: instead of learning hundreds of rules, the human mind has to install a handful of principles and parameters.

scholarly journals Misused Terms in Linguistics

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelina Leivada
Keyword(s):  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
Language Faculty ◽  
Grammaticality Judgment ◽  
Language Universals

Many terms in linguistics, Evelina Leivada observes, are often used inconsistently, incorrectly, or incoherently: Universal Grammar, language universals, parameter, feature, linguistic genotype, language faculty in a narrow sense, hardwired, and grammaticality judgment. These are the very terms that linguists have learned to love, striking evidence that love is often blind.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Cheyne
Keyword(s):  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
External Powers ◽  
The Mind

This introductory chapter commences with a definition of contemplation as the sustained attention to the ideas of reason, which are not merely concepts in the mind, but real, external powers that constitute and order being and value, and therefore excite reverence or admiration. A contemplative, Coleridgean position is outlined as a defence in the crisis of the humanities, arguing that if Coleridge is right in asserting that ideas ‘in fact constitute … humanity’, then they must be the proper or ultimate studies of the disciplines that comprise the humanities. This focus on contemplation as the access to essential ideas explains why Coleridge progressed from, without ever abandoning, imagination to reason as his thought evolved during his lifetime. A section on ‘Contemplation: How to Get There from Here’, is followed by a descriptive bibliography of Coleridge as discussed by philosophers, intellectual historians, theologians, and philosophically minded literary scholars.

GENETICS AND METABOLISM

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-571
Author(s):  
Barton Childs
Keyword(s):  
Mutant Gene ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Affected Patient ◽  
Adrenal Hyperplasia ◽  
Genetic Determination ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Genetically Determined ◽  
Or Genes

IT IS the part of wisdom when about to give a dissertation which one hopes will at once instruct and entertain, to provide at the outset some definition of the subject matter. Genetics is the study of the heritable components of variation; the heritable factors which determine the range or extent of diversity. So, genetics is concerned with heritable differences and likenesses between individuals and between species. One emphasizes the differences because one can be certain of genetic determination of a particular characteristic only when it exists in a population in two or more alternative forms. It is the variants which catch the eye and hold the attention of the investigator, and which by their presence suggest more than one form of the gene or genes which determine that particular characteristic. I would like in what follows to present some examples of investigations of some aspects of genetics in human populations. ADRENAL HYPERPLASIA Several years ago Dr. Melvin Grumbach and I studied the genetics of adrenal hyperplasia, using as our material the patients of Dr. Lawson Wilkins. Since the disease occurs in more than one member of a sibship and since parents are unaffected, we suspected that it was genetically determined and that the affected patient possessed a double dose of a mutant gene; that is, the characteristic was recessive.

scholarly journals The Linguistic Philosophy of Noam Chomsky

2014 ◽  
pp. 103-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Binoy Barman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Philosophical Investigation ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Noam Chomsky ◽  
Human Child ◽  
Mental Exercise ◽  
Linguistic Philosophy

Noam Chomsky, one of the most famous linguists of the twentieth century, based his linguistic works on certain philosophical doctrines. His main contribution to linguistics is Transformational Generative Grammar, which is founded on mentalist philosophy. He opposes the behaviourist psychology in favour of innatism for explaining the acquisition of language. He claims that it becomes possible for human child to learn a language for the linguistic faculty with which the child is born, and that the use of language for an adult is mostly a mental exercise. His ideas brought about a revolution in linguistics, dubbed as Chomskyan Revolution. According to him, the part of language which is innate to human being would be called Universal Grammar. His philosophy holds a strong propensity to rationalism in search of a cognitive foundation. His theory is a continuation of analytic philosophy, which puts language in the centre of philosophical investigation. He would also be identified as an essentialist. This paper considers various aspects of Chomsky’s linguistic philosophy with necessary elaborations.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/pp.v51i1-2.17681

scholarly journals Overall Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Wenzhong Shi ◽  
Michael F. Goodchild ◽  
Michael Batty ◽  
Mei-Po Kwan ◽  
Anshu Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Information Technologies ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Urban Systems ◽  
Data Infrastructure ◽  
Urban Informatics ◽  
New Information ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Urban Science ◽  
Definition Of

AbstractUrban informatics is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding, managing, and designing the city using systematic theories and methods based on new information technologies. Integrating urban science, geomatics, and informatics, urban informatics is a particularly timely way of fusing many interdisciplinary perspectives in studying city systems. This edited book aims to meet the urgent need for works that systematically introduce the principles and technologies of urban informatics. The book gathers over 40 world-leading research teams from a wide range of disciplines, who provide comprehensive reviews of the state of the art and the latest research achievements in their various areas of urban informatics. The book is organized into six parts, respectively covering the conceptual and theoretical basis of urban informatics, urban systems and applications, urban sensing, urban big data infrastructure, urban computing, and prospects for the future of urban informatics. This introductory chapter provides a definition of urban informatics and an outline of the book’s structure and scope.

Introduction and Overview

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Classification Scheme ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Racial Classification ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Definition Of

This introductory chapter discusses how there was a racial classification scheme in America's first census (1790), as there was in the next twenty-two censuses, up until the present. Though the classification was altered in response to the political and intellectual fashions of the day, the underlying definition of America's racial hierarchy never escaped its origins in the eighteenth-century. Even the enormous changing of the racial landscape in the civil rights era failed to challenge a dysfunctional classification, though it did bend it to new purposes. Nor has the demographic upheaval of the present time led to much fresh thinking about how to measure America. The chapter contends that twenty-first-century statistics should not be governed by race thinking that is two and a half centuries out of date.

Drawing Down the Moon: Defining Magic in the Ancient Greco­Roman World

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Perceived Efficacy ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The Social ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Over Time

This introductory chapter provides a definition of magic. One of the most useful adjustments in the recent scholarship on magic has been the turn to considering magic as a dynamic social construct, instead of some particular reality. Magic is not a thing, but a way of talking. Thus, magic is a discourse pertaining to non-normative ritualized activity, in which the deviation from the norm is most often marked in terms of the perceived efficacy of the act, the familiarity of the performance within the cultural tradition, the ends for which the act is performed, or the social location of the performer. Such a discourse always has a history, since such a way of talking about things shifts over time as different people do the talking. When one speaks of “magic,” therefore, one should always explain: “magic for whom?” Any specific piece of evidence from the ancient Greco-Roman world provides an example of magic for that particular person, from one particular perspective. To speak of “magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world” is thus to refer to the whole range of things that various people in those cultures during those times could label as “magic.” The chapter then considers the act of drawing down the moon.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Gracia Liu-Farrer
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Foreign Workers ◽  
Economic Decline ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Highly Skilled Migrants ◽  
Permanent Residency ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Near Future

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Japan as an immigrant country. Japan has become an immigrant country de facto. Starting in the 1980s, to stave off economic decline caused by labor shortage and in the name of internationalization, Japan has tried different programs to bring in foreign workers. In 2012, Japan became one of the most liberal states in its policies for granting permanent residency to highly skilled migrants. As a result, the population of foreigners has been rising for the past three decades and is likely to increase significantly in the near future. Why, then, do both the Japanese government and people inside and outside Japan hesitate to accept the discourse of immigration and the reality of its transformation into an immigrant society? This hesitation has to do with Japan's ethno-nationalist self-identity and the widespread myth surrounding its monoethnic nationhood, on the one hand, and the conventional, albeit anachronistic, definition of “immigrant country” and the difficulty for people to associate an immigrant country with an ethno-nationalist one, on the other hand.

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