Pinker and Jackendoff

[dmellow at sfu.ca]

Thank you for pointing out these articles.

I am rather astonished by Chomsky's apparent change of perspective on the
nature of cognition -- moving substantially away from universal grammar and
innatism.  Has this shift received much attention (in journals and hallways)
among generative syntactians (broadly defined)? Or have we entered something
of a post-Chomskyian era in which his shifting hypotheses no longer have as
much influence?

Cheers,

Dean Mellow
Simon Fraser University


On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 09:54:13 +0100 (BST) rborsley at essex.ac.uk wrote:
> 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