Pinker and Jackendoff

[Borsley R D]

Anyone who is interested the current position of minimalism within
syntactic theory should take a look at Pinker and Jackendoff's 'The
faculty of language: What's special about it?', a reply to the Hauser,
Chomsky and Fitch Cognition article, available from Jackendoff's web page:

http://people.brandeis.edu/~jackendo/

It says all sorts of things that most of us would agree with. It seems to
me that we sometimes exaggerate the strength of minimalism. It is coming
under attack by various people who were once quite close to Chomskyan
syntax. (Newmeyer's recent review article in Language provides another
example.) I think there are some grounds for optimism here.

Bob Borsley


--
Prof. Robert D. Borsley
Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
COLCHESTER CO4 3SQ, UK

rborsley at essex.ac.uk
tel: +44 1206 873762
fax: +44 1206 872198
http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~rborsley