Introducing the Special Issue: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Code-Switching

Research on code-switching was the province of specialists in linguistics alone in the latter part of the twentieth century and is still a valuable source of insights into the human language faculty [...]

Finnish word order: Does comprehension matter?

Finnish word order is relatively free, making room for all mathematically possible word orders in many constructions. Because there is no evidence in this language for radical nonconfigurationality, explanations must be sought from syntax. It is argued in this article that morphosyntax and word order represent syntactic structure at the PF-interface. Rich morphosyntax frees word order, poor morphosyntax freezes it. The hypothesis is formalized within the context of a parsing-oriented theory of the human language faculty (UG) combining left-to-right minimalism with the dynamic syntax approach. The analysis was implemented as an algorithm and successfully tested with a corpus of 119,800 unique Finnish word orders.

Morphology and Tone

Tone is indispensable for understanding many morphological systems of the world. Tonal phenomena may serve the morphological needs of a language in a variety of ways: segmental affixes may be specified for tone just like roots are; affixes may have purely tonal exponents that associate to segmental material provided by other morphemes; affixes may consist of tonal melodies, or “templates”; and tonal processes may apply in a way that is sensitive to morphosyntactic boundaries, delineating word-internal structure. Two behaviors set tonal morphemes apart from other kinds of affixes: their mobility and their ability to apply phrasally (i.e., beyond the limits of the word). Both floating tones and tonal templates can apply to words that are either phonologically grouped with the word containing the tonal morpheme or syntactically dependent on it. Problems generally associated with featural morphology are even more acute in regard to tonal morphology because of the vast diversity of tonal phenomena and the versatility with which the human language faculty puts pitch to use. The ambiguity associated with assigning a proper role to tone in a given morphological system necessitates placing further constraints on our theory of grammar. Perhaps more than any other morphological phenomena, grammatical tone exposes an inadequacy in our understanding both of the relationship between phonological and morphological modules of grammar and of the way that phonology may reference morphological information.

Verb Second in Norwegian: Variation and acquisition

This chapter provides an overview of the micro-variation in Norwegian when it comes to Verb Second (V2) word order, both in the various dialects and in the two standard written varieties of Norwegian. The variation is dependent on a number of factors, including clause type, type of initial element, and information structure. This overview demonstrates a rich inventory of micro-systems, raising the question of how children come to acquire such fine-grained patterns. The chapter addresses this question by providing findings from acquisition research and discusses what this considerable micro-variation and coexisting grammars tell us about the architecture of the human language faculty.

Looking for Unity in a Dictionary Entry

The lexicographer’s engagement with a word is fundamentally a search for unity: a search for the essential idea that holds together a group of things (referents, concepts, senses, etc) that may not be straightforwardly united in the modern mother tongue that provides our metalanguage and our default assumptions. This chapter approaches the problem with the help of perspectives from prototype theory, one of the richest areas in the relatively young discipline of cognitive linguistics. Typically, work in this field is presented as a contribution to the understanding of meaning as such, of the workings of the mental lexicon as an aspect of the human language faculty. The use of prototype theory here will be more limited, avoiding any claims to truth-value and treating it as a sounding-board for new possibilities in modelling and describing the behaviour of words.

The Siege of Paris

In a response to Cedric Boeckx, Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky defend and update their argument that the human language faculty is a species-specific property, with no known group differences and little variation.

Sobre linguagem, cognição e cérebro: Uma entrevista com Peter Hagoort

Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, founding Director of the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (DCCN, 1999), and professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University, all located in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, PETER HAGOORT examines how the brain controls language production and comprehension. He was one of the first to integrate psychological theory and models from neuroscience in an attempt to understand how the human language faculty is instantiated in the brain.

The Neural Basis of Language

The findings discussed in this book lead to a first integrative view on the neurobiology of language, which proposes that BA 44 and the arcuate fasciculus are those brain structures that have evolved to subserve the human capacity to process syntax, which is at the core of the human language faculty. The chapter concludes with a brief statement of why syntax is important for the human being.

„Il linguaggio tra natura e storia“ – sprachtheoretische und sprachphilosophische Reflexionen Tullio De Mauros im Spannungsfeld von europäischer Tradition und angloamerikanischem Sprachdiskurs

This article analyses Tullio DeMauro’s linguistic thought and highlights the originality of his contribution to the current linguistic debate, which revolves around two essential questions: 1.What is special about the human language (faculty)?, and 2. Why and how did it arise in the selectional process of evolution? De Mauro’s approach to language between the poles of “nature” and “history” is contrasted with the basic tenets and ideas of two main paradigms of the contemporary Anglo-American linguistic discourse, namely Noam Chomsky’s generative approach (in its minimalist version) and Ray Jackendoff’s theory of the Tripartite Parallel Architecture of language. In this way, the peculiarities and the special value of De Mauro’s approach come to the fore, combining and synthesizing the European tradition of linguistic thought, especially with its strong semiotic imprint, and modern “naturalist” linguistic theory.