The Minimalist Program introduced a new concept of language and added new content to the innateness position concerning our linguistic capacity. It also redefined the metatheoretical role of the theory of acquisition within generative grammar. This article explores at length all these issues and o¤ers a critical survey of the disconcerting situation dominating today's relationship between syntacticians and acquisitionists.
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 as such from this perspective. We conclude by discussing ways in which to address these central issues, in an attempt to develop a collaborative approach to them.
The first concern of this article is an analysis of locative sentences
in the Iberian
Romances. It is argued that both the existential (〈HAVE〉)
and the stative (〈BE〉)
construction derive from a single abstract verb. Their differences are
based in the
presence vs. the absence of an incorporation process over an otherwise
identical
lexical structure. The second topic of the paper is a study of the behavior
of
pronominal clitics within these sentences. It is observed that while Catalan
has a rich
paradigm of clitics (accusative, dative, locative, partitive), languages
like Asturian,
Galician and certain Spanish dialects resort to a ‘recycling’
strategy in order to
palliate the deficiencies of their clitic paradigms. In this respect, we
will show how
accusative clitics are used as partitive, locative, and even subject clitics.
We also
propose some of the principles which constrain the application of this
strategy.
Finally, an Appendix is devoted to certain uses of the accusative clitics
as modal
markers, also within locative sentences. These uses are closely related
with the
behavior of certain clitics in Northern Italian dialects.
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