Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience 8, 84 Recent research has added new dimensions to our understanding of classical evolution, according to which evolutionary novelties result from gene mutations inherited from parents to offspring. Language is surely one such novelty. Together with specific changes in our genome and epigenome, we suggest that two other (related) mechanisms may […]

Ibon Sarasola, Gorazarre. Bilbao: Editorial de la Universidad del País Vasco p. 665-674 Lucas structures can be abstracted from within Fibonacci structures expressed as Lindenmayer-trees by «atomizing» certain chunks of structure (which yields the Padovan series) and by pruning the immediate context of said atomizations. Such conditions may define a space with arguable syntactic significance. […]

Minimalism and beyond: Radicalizing the interfaces, 169-194 This paper considers how the system identifies multiple occurrences of a syntactic object α as a chain, a set of copies. For Chomsky (1995, 2000, 2001), copies can arise only by movement (internal merge); lexical items introduced by external merge are stipulated to be distinct tokens, coded by […]

The Routledge handbook of syntax, 509-525 The first explicitly minimalist paper, Chomsky (1993), was concerned with unifying a certain set of data and theories that had become prominent in the 1980s. What we may think of as “early minimalism” took what was known from GB for granted and attempted to unify/eliminate relevant conditions. A good […]

This article examines clitic placement in Western Iberian (WI) languages. Central and Eastern Iberian (henceforth C/EI) languages are sensitive to the finiteness of the clause that hosts the clitic. The article argues that a morphophonological property of the peripheral functional category F accounts for the complex pattern of WI clitic placement versus its more homogeneous […]

Of Grammar, Words, and Verses: In Honor of Carlos Piera, 5-18 Generative Semantics set out to unearth the intricacies of paradigms by applying the same computational devices that helped generative grammar account for syntagmatic dependencies. The proposal failed on empirical grounds, as paradigmatic relations lack the productivity, transparency and systematicity of syntagmatic ones, which the […]

International Journal of Evolutionary Biology 2011 (1), 382679 This paper examines the origins of language, as treated within Evolutionary Anthropology, under the light offered by a biolinguistic approach. This perspective is presented first. Next we discuss how genetic, anatomical, and archaeological data, which are traditionally taken as evidence for the presence of language, are circumstantial […]

This article clarifies the concept of cycle, or phase, in minimalist parlance. Cyclicity is a derivational condition if there is one, a strong constraint if derivational timing is so relevant that chunks of structure abandoning the derivation become opaque to further computation. The challenge continues to be to understand the exact nature of this condition, […]

Cuadernos de la ALFAL 3, 188-199 We study some syntactic properties of embedded sentences that seem to be associated to the verb‟ s modal inflection (indicative vs. subjunctive). Focusing on the island status of indicative clauses in some language families, we defend the possibility that such distinction, apparently morphological, has a structural correlate; more specifically, […]

Comparative Evolutionary Psychology, J. Vonk & T. K. Schackelford (eds.), a dedicated number of Evolutionary Psychology Comparative studies of language are difficult because few language precursors are recognized. In this paper we propose a framework for designing experiments that test for structural and semantic patterns indicative of simple or complex grammars as originally described by […]