Human Sciences, Iran, No. 55: 71-78 Perhaps the most challenging as well as the most interesting question raised in linguistic studies is the Innateness Hypothesis of Human Language. There have been various types of evidence proposed to corroborate such a hypothesis. One type is based on different linguistic disorders resulting from brain damages. In the […]

Teorema, XXVIII, pp. 73-83 Two Neanderthals from El Sidrón (Asturias, Spain) have been recently analyzed for possible mutations in FOXP2, a gene involved in the faculty of language. Although this gene was believed to be specific to modern humans, the analysis in question revealed otherwise. The present article reflects on the meaning of this finding, […]

Cambridge University Press

The Chomsky Hierarchy (CH) gives a first approximation as to where human syntax lies in an abstract logical space: the generating device accepting appropriate languages should be slightly more powerful than a standard Push-Down Automaton (a PDA+), although for familiar reasons not much more so. An evolutionary study of syntax ought to give us some […]

This paper discusses the nature of Huang’s (1982) Condition on Extraction Domains (CED) in the context of Chomsky’s (2005) Phase Theory. In particular, we address Chomsky’s (2005) analysis, which takes phase edges (ie, SPEC-v* and SPEC-C) to give rise to locality problems for sub-extraction. Concentrating on the Subject Condition subcase, we provide empirical evidence that […]