Theoretical Linguistics, 36: 69-76 ‘Parameters in minimalist theory: The case of Scandinavian’ ( henceforth, PMT), by Anders Holmberg, is an interesting attempt to defend the view that ‘deep parameters’ should be part of the grammatical system. PMT argues that parameters should be seen as points of ‘underspecification’, and in part as 3rdfactor effects in the […]

Biolinguistics, 4, 1 Biolinguistics aims to shed light on the specifically biological nature of human language, focusing on five foundational questions:(1) What are the properties of the language phenotype?(2) How does language ability grow and mature in individuals?(3) How is language put to use?(4) How is language implemented in the brain?(5) What evolutionary processes led […]

Biolinguistics 3 (4), 404-406 Languages with stress group syllables into metrical feet (Halle and Idsardi 1995,Hayes 1995)—non-exhaustive groups of contiguous syllables. The size of feet innatural languages ranges from unary (a single syllable) to unbounded (as manysyllables as possible); in addition syllables can also remain unfooted. Under theseconditions, the number of possible metrical footings for […]

Munibe El reciente análisis de ADN fósil de dos Neandertales procedentes de la Cueva El Sidrón (Asturias) ha revelado que los Neandertales poseían las mutaciones del gen FOXP2 consideradas específicas de los humanos modernos. Dado que FOXP2 está implicado en el desarrollo y uso del lenguaje, tal hallazgo está provocando una revisión de las capacidades […]

Of minds and language: A dialogue with Noam Chomsky in the Basque Country As all of you know, every time I listen to a talk by Randy Gallistel, I think I have made a career mistake–I should have studied a different animal. But anyway, in the interests of interdisciplinarity, I will talk about human animals, […]

Biolinguistics 2 (2-3), 225-232 Two Neanderthals from El Sidrón (Asturias, Spain; Rosas et al. 2006) have been recently analyzed by Krause et al.(henceforth K) for possible mutations in FOXP2 (Krause et al. 2007), a gene involved in the faculty of language (Lai et al. 2001). Although these mutations were believed to be specific to modern […]

Modern (theoretical) linguistics was born half a century ago in the midst of what is often called the cognitive revolution. Noam Chomsky (1956, 1957), Morris Halle (1995, 2002), Eric Lenneberg (1967), and others distanced themselves from the then-dominant behaviorist paradigm, and reached back to earlier philosophical concerns, using the faculty of language as “a mirror […]

The Physics of Life Review In this paper we discuss how Fibonacci growth patterns are apparent in the structure of human language. We moreover show how familiar dynamics yielding these sorts of patterns in nature may be taken to apply, at some level of abstraction, for the human faculty of language. The overall picture casts […]

Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca” Julio de Urquijo”, 561-571 In this paper we treat the phenomenon of syntactic preference as a grammaticality judgment that emerges in situations of structural ambiguity. There seem to be instances where, despite the fact that several relevant structures for some terminal string are grammatical, speakers somehow feel that they […]