Anuario del Seminario Julio de Urquijo. International Journal of Basque Linguistics and Philology This paper explores two simple, related ideas, within the Minimalist Program: that the skeletal Tense system of clauses involves a single T node, whether they are finite or infinitive, of the raising or the control type; and that this system is implicated […]

The biolinguistic turn. Issues on language and biology, ed. J. Rosselló & J. Martın Starting out from some well-known formal characteristics of grammars (the Chomsky Hierarchy) we revisit the question of whether the fossil record can provide us with reliable early evidence for fully syntactic linguistic behaviors. We show how the tying of knots requires […]

Lingue e Linguaggio, D. Delfitto, G. Graffi & S. Scalise (eds.), IV-1, 27-79, special issue on Language Evolution Enard et al. 2002 date the last mutation in FOXP2, the gene implicated in some central aspects of human language –crucially including context-sensitive syntax– to ca. 120,000before the present (B.P.). Traits in modern humans that arguably presuppose […]

International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, 14 (2), special issue on Cognition and Complex Brain Dynamics The study of language, its processing and its bearing on human cortical processes are all extensive domains of investigation in their own right. In this overview tutorial we limit ourselves to a sample of core illustrative issues. Our central […]

Variation and universals in biolinguistics, 341-377

Coreference, modality, and focus, 45-70

Adaptive Behavior, 11, 37-69 This article reviews recent progress made by computational studies investigating the emergence, via learning or evolutionary mechanisms, of communication among a collection of agents. This work spans issues related to animal communication and the origins and evolution of language. The studies reviewed show how population size, spatial constraints on agent interactions, […]

Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca” Julio de Urquijo”, 597-609 In this paper we analyze the core instances of infinitival complementation in Basque. Some familiar facts are discussed, and also a surprising one which has never been analyzed: the peculiar Case/agreement distributions apparent in instances of obligatory control. If valid, our analysis has potentially important […]

The Linguistic Review, 19 (1-2) 147-150 Positive data involving auxiliary fronting are never evidence for a constraint such as the structure-dependent hypothesis. At best, positive data of any complexity are direct evidence for a simple-minded hypothesis, of the sort of ‘front the first auxiliary (after something or other)’. On the widespread assumption that negative data […]

Derivation and explanation in the Minimalist Program, 106-132