Précis of Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution,

Abstract

The goal of this study is to reintegrate the theory of generative grammar into the cognitive sciences. Generative grammar was right to focus on the child's acquisition of language as its central problem, leading to the hypothesis of an innate Universal Grammar. However, generative grammar was mistaken in assuming that the syntactic component is the sole course of combinatoriality, and that everything else is “interpretive.” The proper approach is a parallel architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are autonomous generative systems linked by interface components. The parallel architecture leads to an integration within linguistics, and to a far better integration with the rest of cognitive neuroscience. It fits naturally into the larger architecture of the mind/brain and permits a properly mentalistic theory of semantics. It results in a view of linguistic performance in which the rules of grammar are directly involved in processing. Finally, it leads to a natural account of the incremental evolution of the language capacity.

The influence of verb-bound syntactic preferences on the processing of syntactic structures.

“…We found that verb-bound preferences indeed influence syntactic processing: there was an inverse preference effect of syntactic priming effects in response choices and a positive preference effect of syntactic priming effects in response latencies. This support the idea that syntactic processing is lexically guided (lexicalist parsing models of syntax; e.g., Jackendoff, 2002;Joshi & Schabes, 1997;MacDonald et al, 1994).…”

“…For instance, the verb "to show" in Dutch ["tonen"] has a preference for the prepositional object dative (Bernolet & Hartsuiker, 2010), while in German ["zeigen"] it has a preference for the double object dative (Schulte im Walde, 2003). Evidence for a link between specific verbs and structure-preferences thus provides strong support for lexicalist parsing models of syntax (e.g., Jackendoff, 2002;Joshi & Schabes, 1997;MacDonald et al, 1994), proposing that syntactic processing is driven by constraints at the lexical level.…”

“…The close connection between verbs and syntax inspired lexicalist parsing models of syntax (e.g., Bresnan, 2001;Jackendoff, 2002;Joshi & Schabes, 1997;MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994), which propose that syntactic processing is strongly lexically guided. Confirming this idea, verb-bound syntactic preferences have been found to affect syntactic processing (Melinger & Dobel, 2005;Trueswell & Kim, 1998;Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993).…”

Event-related brain potentials during the monitoring of speech errors

“…Furthermore, semantic priming and the syntactic garden-path phenomenon can be seen as prediction or anticipation of upcoming words. Similarly, story completion and the cloze test (Taylor, 1953) are taken to reflect word prediction (see Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, and Hagoort, 2005 for a detailed discussion; but see also Jackendoff, 2002).…”

Information in the Biosphere: Biological and Digital Worlds

“…This can be seen in the strong parallels between language and genes [31], and especially if words are thought of as autonomous informational structures [32]. Indeed, use of the terms 'transcription' and 'translation' to describe 'expression' of biological information illustrates how deeply these parallels run.…”