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 […]

Biolinguistic Investigations and the Formal Language Hierarchy, 105-132 The minimalist program (MP) assumes three factors for linguistic design. Two of these (genetic endowment and contingent variation) are customarily presupposed within generative grammar. The third factor involves general principles of computation and overall economy, which remain controversial in linguistics and relatively obscure within MP. This chapter […]

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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 […]

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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, […]