The Necessity of Syntax

Jose-Luis Mendivil jlmendi at POSTA.UNIZAR.ES
Tue Dec 10 12:49:57 UTC 2002


At 17:25 -0700 9/12/02, Sherman Wilcox wrote:
>
>To me, what we need to talk about is selectionist as opposed to
>instructionist models. Darwinian evolution is selectionist. But
>selectionist models don't have to rely on natural selection. Neural
>Darwinisn (Gerald Edelman) is a somatic selection account of brain
>development and function; Edelman won the Nobel Prize for his
>selectionist model of the immune system.

I think it was N. Jerne who won the Nobel Prize for a selectionist
model of the immune system. His reception lecture was significantly
published as: Jerne, N.K. (1985): "The Generative Grammar of the
Immune System", Science, 229: 1057-1059.

And, in a relevant paper, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini described a
connection between selectionist theories in biology and in generative
linguistics: Piatelli-Palmarini, M. (1989): "Evolution, Selection and
Cognition: from 'learning' to Parameter Setting in Biology and in the
Study of Language". Cognition, 31: 1-44.

For a more explicit connection between selectionist theories and
generative models of language acquisition see also the first chapter
of Lightfoot's (1991) How to Set Parameters.

Best regards,
Jose-Luis Mendivil.
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