Chomskyan R Evolutions

It is not unusual for contemporary linguists to claim that “Modern Linguistics began in 1957” (with the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures). Some of the essays in Chomskyan (R)evolutions examine the sources, the nature and the extent of the theoretical changes Chomsky introduced in the 1950s. Other contributions explore the key concepts and disciplinary alliances that have evolved considerably over the past sixty years, such as the meanings given for “Universal Grammar”, the relationship of Chomskyan linguistics to other disciplines (Cognitive Science, Psychology, Evolutionary Biology), and the interactions between mainstream Chomskyan linguistics and other linguistic theories active in the late 20th century: Functionalism, Generative Semantics and Relational Grammar. The broad understanding of the recent history of linguistics points the way towards new directions and methods that linguistics can pursue in the future.

Chomsky's atavistic revolution (with a little help from his enemies) / John E. Joseph -- The equivocation of form and notation in generative grammar / Christopher Beedham -- Chomsky's paradigm : what it includes and what it excludes / Joanna Radwanska-Williams -- "Scientific revolutions" and other kinds of regime change / Stephen O. Murray -- Noam and Zellig / Bruce Nevin -- Chomsky 1951a and Chomsky 1951b / Peter T. Daniels -- Grammar and language in syntactic structures : transformational progress and structuralist "reflux" / Pierre Swiggers -- Chomsky's other revolution / R. Allen Harris -- Chomsky between revolutions / Malcolm D. Hyman -- What do we talk about, when we talk about "universal grammar" and how have we talked about it? / Margaret Thomas -- Migrating propositions and the evolution of generative grammar / Marcus Tomalin -- Universalism and human difference in Chomskyan linguistics : the first "superhominid" and the language faculty / Christopher Hutton -- The evolution of meaning and grammar : Chomskyan theory and the evidence from grammaticalization / T. Craig Christy -- Chomsky in search of a pedigree / Camiel Hamans & Pieter A.M. Seuren -- The "linguistics wars" : a tentative assessment by an outsider witness / Giorgio Graffi -- British empiricism and transformational grammar : a current debate / Jacqueline Léon -- Historiography's contribution to theoretical linguistics / Julie Tetel Andresen.

Discusses the relationship between Chomskyan syntactic theory and the evolution of language.

This volume presents essays by some of the leading figures in the vanguard of theoretical linguistics within the framework of universal grammmar. One of the first books to adopt the "minimalist" framework to syntactic analysis, it includes a central essay by Noam Chomsky on the minimalist program and covers a range of topics in syntax and morphology. Contributors: Luigi Burzio, Héctor Campos, Noam Chomsky, Joseph E. Emonds, Robert Freidin, James Harris, Ray Jackendoff, Paula Kempchinsky, Howard Lasnik, Claudia Parodi, Carlos Piera, A. Carlos Quicoli, Dominique Sportiche, Esther Torrego.

Berwick and Chomsky draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and humans' remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire it. “A loosely connected collection of four essays that will fascinate anyone interested in the extraordinary phenomenon of language.” —New York Review of Books We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals. Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds.

A radically revised and updated account of Noam Chomsky's thought and its revolutionary impact on linguistics, psychology, philosophy and politics.

This volume is devoted to a major chapter in the history of linguistics in the United States, the period from the 1930s to the 1980s, and focuses primarily on the transition from (post-Bloomfieldian) structural linguistics to early generative grammar. The first three chapters in the book discuss the rise of structuralism in the 1930s; the interplay between American and European structuralism; and the publication of Joos's Readings in Linguistics in 1957. Later chapters explore the beginnings of generative grammar and the reaction to it from structural linguists; how generativists made their ideas more widely known; the response to generativism in Europe; and the resistance to the new theory by leading structuralists, which continued into the 1980s. The final chapter demonstrates that contrary to what has often been claimed, generative grammarians were not in fact organizationally dominant in the field in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.

In this path-breaking work, Paul Thagard draws on the history and philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, and the field of artificial intelligence to develop a theory of conceptual change capable of accounting for all major scientific revolutions. The history of science contains dramatic episodes of revolutionary change in which whole systems of concepts have been replaced by new systems. Thagard provides a new and comprehensive perspective on the transformation of scientific conceptual systems. Thagard examines the Copernican and the Darwinian revolutions and the emergence of Newton's mechanics, Lavoisier's oxygen theory, Einstein's theory of relativity, quantum theory, and the geological theory of plate tectonics. He discusses the psychological mechanisms by which new concepts and links between them are formed, and advances a computational theory of explanatory coherence to show how new theories can be judged to be superior to previous ones.