Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 18 (3), 863-71 Lappin, Levine and Johnson (henceforth ‘LLJ’) are concerned about the field gravitating towards the Minimalist Program (MP) without having exhausted the possibilities of the ‘Government and Binding’ (GB) theory.1 In this reply, I concentrate on a concrete paradigm that has resisted a GB analysis. Since LLJ attack […]

Digital Repository at the University of Maryland A simulation environment has been created to support study of emergent communication. Multiple agents exist in a two-dimensional world where they must find food and avoid predators. While non-communicating agents may survive, the world is configured so that survival and fitness can be enhanced through the use of […]

Minimalist Syntax: The Essential Readings, 337

MIT Press

A main desideratum of the Minimalist Program is reducing substantive principles to interface (or bare output) conditions, and formal principles to economy conditions. Much energy has been devoted to rethinking constraints and phenomena that appear to challenge this idea, in the process sharpening observations and descriptions. In this chapter, I attempt to reduce a version […]

Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 17, 403-444

Current Studies in Linguistics Series 32, MIT Press

DELTA, 16, 221-43, Unicamp, Brazil One of the cornerstones of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program is the role played by economy. This paper discusses different ways in which Chomsky’s notion of economy in linguistics can be understood, given current views on dynamic systems and, in particular, on evolution in biological systems. Um dos pontos principais do Programa […]

Theoretical Linguistics, 25 (1), 31-73 Language presents paradigmatic regularities, together with the usual syntagmatic ones that syntax is designed to capture. This article proposes a way of deriving systematic hierarchies by analyzing linguistic categories through the algebraic structure of numbering systems (hence by way of dimensions, each recursively defined on the previous). The goal is […]