Much of the best contemporary work in the philosophy of language and content makes appeal to the theories developed in generative syntax. In particular, there is a presumption that—at some level and in some way—the structures provided by syntactic theory mesh with or support our conception of content/linguistic meaning as grounded in our first-person understanding of our communicative speech acts. This paper will suggest that there is no such tight fit. Its claim will be that, if recent generative theories (...) are on the right lines, syntactic structure provides both too much and too little to serve as the structural partner for content, at least as that notion is generally understood in philosophy. The paper will substantiate these claims by an assessment of the recent work of King, Stanley, and others. (shrink)

Minimalist Syntax is a collection of essays that analyze major syntactic processes in a variety of languages, all unified by their perspective from within the Minimalist Program. Introduces important concepts in the Minimalist approach to syntactic theory. Emphasizes empirical consequences of the Minimalist approach through innovative analyses. Highlights the importance of Minimalist syntax in explaining features of natural languages. Includes contributions from leading syntacticians.

The discrepancy between syntax and semantics is a painstaking issue that hinders a better comprehension of the underlying neuronal processes in the human brain. In order to tackle the issue, we at first describe a striking correlation between Wittgenstein's Tractatus, that assesses the syntactic relationships between language and world, and Perlovsky's joint language-cognitive computational model, that assesses the semantic relationships between emotions and “knowledge instinct”. Once established a correlation between a purely logical approach to the language and computable psychological (...) activities, we aim to find the neural correlates of syntax and semantics in the human brain. Starting from topological arguments, we suggest that the semantic properties of a proposition are processed in higher brain's functional dimensions than the syntactic ones. In a fully reversible process, the syntactic elements embedded in Broca's area project into multiple scattered semantic cortical zones. The presence of higher functional dimensions gives rise to the increase in informational content that takes place in semantic expressions. Therefore, diverse features of human language and cognitive world can be assessed in terms of both the logic armor described by the Tractatus, and the neurocomputational techniques at hand. One of our motivations is to build a neuro-computational framework able to provide a feasible explanation for brain's semantic processing, in preparation for novel computers with nodes built into higher dimensions. (shrink)

Abstract It is widely assumed that the meaning of at least some types of expressions involves more than their reference to objects, and hence that there may be co-referential expressions which differ in meaning. It is also widely assumed that ?syntax does not suffice for semantics?, i.e. that we cannot account for the fact that expressions have semantic properties in purely syntactical or computational terms. The main goal of the paper is to argue against a third related assumption, namely (...) that what is responsible for a difference in meaning between co-referential expressions is the computational difference in the cognitive functioning of the expressions. ?Intentional aspects? of expressions?those features which their meanings involve in addition to reference?cannot be syntacticized, since they are individuated not in terms of any cognitive feature, but rather in terms of those properties of the referents through which the expressions refer to them, and cognitive features cannot determine such properties in exactly the same sense as they cannot determine reference. (shrink)

W. Labov's & T. Labov's findings concerning their child grammar acquisition ("Learning the Syntax of Questions" in Recent Advances in the Psychology of Language, Campbell, R. & Smith, P. Eds, New York: Plenum Press, 1978) are interpreted in terms of different semantics of why & other wh-questions. Z. Dubiel.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This chapter focuses on the frameworks of Head‐Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) as it developed from Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG), and Lexical‐Functional Grammar (LFG). Declarative frameworks are not generative, as they do not ‘generate’ anything in the sense of the preceding paragraph. Pullum refers to that kind of approach as Generative‐Enumerative Syntax and differentiates it from Model‐Theoretic Syntax: GPSG, HPSG, and LFG essentially fall in the latter category. It describes some key aspects of declarative frameworks, and the (...) motivation for them. The chapter considers how declarative frameworks instantiate a view of Generative Grammar directly inspired by Noam Chomsky's early work, but without the procedural component. It presents some of the core design features which motivate declarative frameworks, and explores how syntactic phenomena are factorized and formalized in declarative frameworks, with a view to comparison with Minimalist Program analyses. (shrink)

This book is a collection of key readings on Minimalist Syntax, the most recent, and arguably most important, theoretical development within the Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic theory. Brings together in one volume the key readings on Minimalist Syntax Includes an introduction and overview of the Minimalist Program written by two prominent researchers Excerpts crucial pieces from the beginning of Minimalism to the most recent work and provides invaluable coverage of the most important topics.

I make an attempt at the description of the delicate role of the standard model of arithmetic for the syntax of formal systems. I try to assess whether the possible instability in the notion of finiteness deriving from the nonstandard interpretability of arithmetic affects the very notions of syntactic metatheory and of formal system. I maintain that the crucial point of the whole question lies in the evaluation of the phenomenon of formalization. The ideas of Skolem, Zermelo, Beth and (...) Carnap (among others) on the problem are discussed. ‘A tries to explain to B the meaning of negation. Finally A gives up, saying: “You don’t understand what I mean, and I am not going to explain any longer,” to which B replies: “Yes, I see what you mean, and I am glad you are willing to continue your explanations”’. G. Mannoury, reported by E. W. Beth (Beth, 1963, 489). (shrink)

This study looks at the syntax of conversational same turn self-repair in Indonesian. STSR is the process by which speakers make alterations to the turn in progress. Patterns of repetition in STSR allow us to determine which syntactic categories speakers make use of in organizing self-repair. Previously observed cross-linguistic variation in this area has been explained in terms of projectability. The majority of Indonesian repairs prove to be limited in scope to a single word or a single immediate constituent. (...) However, larger scope recycling involving constituents such as clause and verb phrase do occur. Indonesian findings are compared with those of previously published studies of other languages. The results support an interpretation in terms of projectability. (shrink)

In transformational grammar the notion of a chain has been central ever since its introduction in the early 80's. However, an insightful theory of chains has hitherto been missing. This paper develops such a theory of chains. Though it is applicable to virtually all chains, we shall focus on movement-induced chains. It will become apparent that chains are far from innocuous. A proper formulation of the structures and algorithms involved is quite a demanding task. Furthermore, we shall show that it (...) is possible to define structures in which the notion of a chain coincides with that of a constituent, so that the notion of a chain becomes redundant, generally without making the theory more complicated. These structures avoid some of the problems that beset the standard structures (such as unbound traces created by remnant movement). (shrink)

Cedric Boeckx focuses on two core components of grammar: phrase structure and locality.

We compare our model of unsupervised learning of linguistic structures, ADIOS [1], to some recent work in computational linguistics and in grammar theory. Our approach resembles the Construction Grammar in its general philosophy (e.g., in its reliance on structural generalizations rather than on syntax projected by the lexicon, as in the current generative theories), and the Tree Adjoining Grammar in its computational characteristics (e.g., in its apparent affinity with Mildly Context Sensitive Languages). The representations learned by our algorithm are (...) truly emergent from the (unannotated) corpus data, whereas those found in published works on cognitive and construction grammars and on TAGs are hand-tailored. Thus, our results complement and extend both the computational and the more linguistically oriented research into language acquisition. We conclude by suggesting how empirical and formal study of language can be best integrated. (shrink)

Mathematical tools of category theory are employed to study the syntax-semantics problem in the philosophy of mathematics. Every category has its internal logic, and if this logic is sufficiently rich, a given category provides semantics for a certain formal theory and, vice versa, for each formal theory one can construct a category, providing a semantics for it. There exists a pair of adjoint functors, Lang and Syn, between a category and a category of theories. These functors describe, in a (...) formal way, mutual dependencies between the syntactical structure of a formal theory and the internal logic of its semantics. Bell’s program to regard the world of topoi as the univers de discoursof mathematics and as a tool of its local interpretation, is extended to a collection of categories and all functors between them, called “categorical field”. This informal idea serves to study the interaction between syntax and semantics of mathematical theories, in an analogy to functors Lang and Syn. With the help of these concepts, the role of Gödel-like limitations in the categorical field is briefly discussed. Some suggestions are made concerning the syntax-semantics interaction as far as physical theories are concerned. (shrink)

This volume contains twelve chapters on the derivation of and the correlates to verb initial word order. The studies in this volume cover such widely divergent languages as Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old Irish, Biblical Hebrew, Jakaltek, Mam, Lummi (Straits Salish), Niuean, Malagasy, Palauan, K'echi', and Zapotec, from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, including Minimalism, information structure, and sentence processing. The first book to take a crosslinguistic comparative approach to verb initial syntax, this volume provides new data to (...) some old problems anddebates and explores some innovative approaches to the derivation of verb initial order. (shrink)

P.M.S. Hacker has argued that there are numerous misconceptions in James Conant's account of Wittgenstein's views and of those of Carnap. I discuss only Hacker's treatment of Conant on logical syntax in the _Tractatus. I try to show that passages in the _Tractatus which Hacker takes to count strongly against Conant's view do no such thing, and that he himself has not explained how he can account for a significant passage which certainly appears to support Conant's reading.

Three studies provided evidence that syntax influences intentionality judgments. In Experiment 1, participants made either speeded or unspeeded intentionality judgments about ambiguously intentional subjects or objects. Participants were more likely to judge grammatical subjects as acting intentionally in the speeded relative to the reflective condition (thus showing an intentionality bias), but grammatical objects revealed the opposite pattern of results (thus showing an unintentionality bias). In Experiment 2, participants made an intentionality judgment about one of the two actors in a (...) partially symmetric sentence (e.g., “John exchanged products with Susan”). The results revealed a tendency to treat the grammatical subject as acting more intentionally than the grammatical object. In Experiment 3 participants were encouraged to think about the events that such sentences typically refer to, and the tendency was significantly reduced. These results suggest a privileged relationship between language and central theory-of-mind concepts. More specifically, there may be two ways of determining intentionality judgments: (1) an automatic verbal bias to treat grammatical subjects (but not objects) as intentional (2) a deeper, more careful consideration of the events typically described by a sentence. (shrink)

Dynamic Syntax (DS: Kempson et al. 2001; Cann et al. 2005) is an action-based grammar formalism which models the process of natural language understanding as monotonic tree growth. This paper presents an introduction to the notions of incrementality and underspecification and update, drawing on the assumptions made by DS. It lays out the tools of the theoretical framework that are necessary to understand the accounts developed in the other contributions to the Special Issue. It also represents an up-to-date account (...) of the framework, combining the developments that have previously remained distributed in a diverse body of literature. (shrink)

This review considers Semantic Syntax and Slavic Transformational Syntax particularly in the light of their contributions to the theory of grammar. Semantic Syntax is shown to have a polemical bias against the Aspects model and toward generative semantics. Its editor's position in the constellation of semantic logicians is defined; pro-Chomskian objections to the logical-cognitive semantic theory are advanced. Slavic Transformational Syntax is comprised of essays with a wide range of theoretical stances; the insights of the radical (...) case grammar of James Miller are compared with those of Semantic Syntax. Remarks on deixis by Richard Brecht are discussed in relationship to semantic-logic approaches. Certain similarities of Jakobsonian functionalism and generative semantics are discussed. (shrink)

Language—often said to set human beings apart from other animals—has resisted explanation in terms of evolution. Language has—among others—two fundamental and distinctive features: syntax and the ability to express non-present actions and events. We suggest that the relation between this representation (of non-present action) and syntax can be analyzed as a relation between a function and a structure to fulfill this function. The strategy of the paper is to ask if there is any evidence of pre-linguistic communication that (...) fulfills the function of communicating an absent action. We identify a structural similarity between understanding indexes of past actions of conspecifics (who did what to whom) and one of the simplest and most paradigmatic linguistic syntactic patterns – that of the simple transitive sentence. When a human being infers past events from an index (i.e., a trace, the conditions of a conspecifics or an animal, a constellation or an object) the interpreters’ comprehension must rely on concepts similar in structure and function to the ‘thematic roles’ believed to underpin the comprehension of linguistic syntax: in his or her mind the idea of a past action or event emerges along with thematic role-like concepts; in the case of the presentation of, e.g., a hunting trophy, the presenter could be understood to be an agent (subject) and the trophy a patient (direct object), while the past action killed is implied by the condition of the object and its possession by the presenter. We discuss whether both the presentation of a trophy and linguistic syntax might have emerged independently while having the same function (to represent a past action) or whether the presentation of an index of a deed could constitute a precursor of language. Both possibilities shed new light on early, and maybe first, language use. (shrink)

The organization of words into phrases and sentences is what is traditionally associated with syntax: the “syntagmatic” combinatoriality in human language. Surface language, crucially including word formation, is a mere “expression” of deep thought, and whatever word-level regularities can be found ought to be studied as regularities of thought unmediated by lexical expression. Argument structure is syntactic, necessarily, since it is to be identified with the syntactic structures projected by lexical heads. The configurational position that an argument ends up (...) in may be the result of syntactic processes that are subject to standard syntactic constraints such as locality—lending support to the inherently syntactic character of conceptual structures of the basic thematic kind, as well as to lexical decomposition. (shrink)

A central debate in the cognitive sciences surrounds the nature of adult speakers' linguistic representations: Are they purely syntactic (a traditional and widely held view; e.g., Branigan & Pickering, ), or are they semantically structured? A recent study (Ambridge, Bidgood, Pine, Rowland, & Freudenthal, ) found support for the latter view, showing that adults' acceptability judgments of passive sentences were significantly predicted by independent semantic “affectedness” ratings designed to capture the putative semantics of the construction (e.g., Bob was pushed by (...) Wendy is rated as more acceptable than Bob was liked by Wendy, as Bob is more affected in the former). However, because English lacks a separate topicalization construction which provides an alternative means of highlighting the patient (e.g., BOB, Wendy kicked), these findings have a possible alternative explanation: that highly affected entities are more likely to be topicalized, rather than passivized per se. Here we show that, in fact, Ambridge et al.'s () finding replicates in Indonesian, a language with a topicalization construction. The present study therefore provides particularly compelling evidence that grammatical representations have semantic structure. (shrink)

This book examines how word order variations in language can be regulated by various factors in cyclic syntax. In particular, it offers a valuable contribution to the current debate concerning the effect of cyclic Spell-out on the (re-)ordering of elements in scrambling. Heejeong Ko provides in-depth discussion of the interaction of the syntax-phonology interface with operations at the syntax proper, as well as examining how the semantic meaning of a structure can be correlated with certain types of (...) orderings in cyclic edges of the syntax. The author's proposal accounts for a wide range of scrambling data in East Asian languages such as Korean and Japanese, with particular focus on the consequences of cyclic linearization for (sub-)scrambling, types of quantifier floating, variations in predicate fronting, and types of argument structure and secondary predicates. The book will be of interest to syntacticians from graduate level upwards, particularly those interested in the syntax-phonology and syntax-semantics interfaces. The range of novel data presented will make it a valuable resource for linguists studying Korean, Japanese, and scrambling languages in general. (shrink)

This article provides arguments to show that there is a form of syntax specific to the bodily movements of certain martial arts. This syntax of bodily mouvements is different from that usually identified in multimodal conversational analysis which consists of the addition of bodily extensions to speech turns Keevallik (Res Lang Soc Interact 46(1):1–21, 2013) and (Res Lang Soc Interact 51(1):1–21, 2018). Based on an analysis of video extracts from two martial arts (Aikido and Kenpo), the article shows (...) that martial arts movements, accomplished within a martial intercorporeality, acquire syntactic characteristics that make it possible to anticipate trajectories accomplished simultaneously, before and during body contact. The article presents the four movement-units common to these two martial arts and the way participants combine them, in a sequentiality of simultaneity. (shrink)

Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of 30 (...) propositional attitude verbs’ syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination task and an ordinal scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly. Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine-grained information about propositional attitude verbs’ semantics carried in their syntactic distributions—whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally. (shrink)

It is commonly argued that the rules of language, as distinct from its semantic features, are the characteristics which most clearly distinguish language from the communication systems of other species. A number of linguists (e.g., Chomsky 1972, 1980; Pinker 1994) have suggested that the universal features of grammar (UG) are unique human adaptations showing no evolutionary continuities with any other species. However, recent summaries of the substantive features of UG are quite remarkable in the very general nature of the features (...) proposed. While the syntax of any given language can be quite complex, the specific rules vary so much between languages that the truly universal (i.e. innate) aspects of grammar are not complex at all. In fact, these features most closely resemble a set of general descriptions of our richly complex semantic cognition, and not a list of specific rules. General principles of the evolutionary process suggest that syntax is more properly understood as an emergent characteristic of the explosion of semantic complexity that occurred during hominid evolution. It is argued that grammatical rules used in given languages are likely to be simply conventionalized, invented features of language, and not the result of an innate, grammar-specific module. The grammatical and syntactic regularities that are found across languages occur simply because all languages attempt to communicate the same sorts of semantic information. (shrink)

I critically examine some provocative arguments that John Searle presents in his book The Rediscovery of Mind to support the claim that the syntactic states of a classical computational system are "observer relative" or "mind dependent" or otherwise less than fully and objectively real. I begin by explaining how this claim differs from Searle's earlier and more well-known claim that the physical states of a machine, including the syntactic states, are insufficient to determine its semantics. In contrast, his more recent (...) claim concerns the syntax, in particular, whether a machine actually has symbols to underlie its semantics. I then present and respond to a number of arguments that Searle offers to support this claim, including whether machine symbols are observer relative because the assignment of syntax is arbitrary, or linked to universal realizability, or linked to the sub-personal interpretive acts of a homunculus, or linked to a person's consciousness. I conclude that a realist about the computational model need not be troubled by such arguments. Their key premises need further support. (shrink)

Until Tarski’s semantic truth definition, the concept of truth was used informally in metalogic (metamathematics) or even proposed to be eliminated in favour of syntactic concepts, as in Rudolf Carnap’s early programme of philosophy via logical syntax. Tarski demonstrated that the concept of truth can be defined using precise mathematical devices. If L is a language for which the truth definition is given, it must be done in the metalanguage ML. According to this construction, semantics for L must be (...) performed in ML. The most important example concerns the arithmetic of natural numbers. According to Tarski’s theorem of undefinability, the set of truths of this theory cannot be defined in it – such a definition can be formulated in the metatheory. This fact illuminates the relation between syntax and semantics. If Th is a rich theory and presented as a syntactic theory (a calculus), its semantics is not reducible to its syntax. According to Tarski’s view, related to his work in the simple theory of types, semantics for L can be always constructed in the morphology of ML, provided that L is of the finite order. Two problems arise: what does the word “morphology” mean and how to formulate these ideas, when the framework is based on the distinction between first‑order logic and higher‑order logic. As far as the issue concerns morphology, it is possible to consider it as an extended syntax, i.e. vocabulary which does not refer to semantic concepts or defines such notions by not‑semantic, e.g. set‑theoretical, categories. If the hierarchy of logical types is replaced by the distinction of logics of various orders, in particular between first‑order and higher‑order (it is sufficient to use second‑order), it is possible to show that semantics of first‑order rich theories cannot be defined inside them. (shrink)

Turner argues that computer programs must have purposes, that implementation is not a kind of semantics, and that computers might need to understand what they do. I respectfully disagree: Computer programs need not have purposes, implementation is a kind of semantic interpretation, and neither human computers nor computing machines need to understand what they do.

Dieser Buchtitel ist Teil des Digitalisierungsprojekts Springer Book Archives mit Publikationen, die seit den Anfängen des Verlags von 1842 erschienen sind. Der Verlag stellt mit diesem Archiv Quellen für die historische wie auch die disziplingeschichtliche Forschung zur Verfügung, die jeweils im historischen Kontext betrachtet werden müssen. Dieser Titel erschien in der Zeit vor 1945 und wird daher in seiner zeittypischen politisch-ideologischen Ausrichtung vom Verlag nicht beworben.

Following Aristotle (who himself was following Parmenides), philosophers have appealed to the distributional reflexes of expressions in determining their semantic status, and ultimately, the nature of the extra-linguistic world. This methodology has been practiced throughout the history of philosophy; it was clarified and made popular by the likes of Zeno Vendler and J.L. Austin, and is realized today in the toolbox of linguistically minded philosophers. Studying the syntax of natural language was fueled by the belief that there is a (...) conceptually tight connection between the syntax of our language and its semantics, and the belief that there is a similarly tight connection between the semantics of our language and metaphysical facts about the world. We are less confident than our colleagues about the relation syntax has to semantics and metaphysics. In particular, we do not believe that the current status of theoretical syntax (or semantics or metaphysics) provides much support for either of the above two beliefs. We will illustrate our view with a case study regarding the status of complex demonstratives. We will show that a recent and particularly subtle syntactically based argument for the semantic/metaphysical status of complex demonstratives does not in fact show what semantic category complex demonstratives are.. (shrink)

I CATEGORIES AND PRINCIPLES ii Introductory Remarks The value of linguistics as a cognitive science lies largely in its potential for providing insights ...

Linear Syntax makes a case for a critical reassessment of the wide-spread view that syntax can be reduced to tree structures. It argues that a crucial part of the description of German clausal syntax should instead be based on concepts that are defined in terms of linear order. By connecting the descriptive tools of modern phrase-structure grammar with traditional descriptive scholarship, Andreas Kathol offers a new perspective on many long-standing problems in syntactic theory.

Die Syntax als die Disziplin der Linguistik, die den Satzbau zum Gegenstand hat, ist heute in eine Vielfalt einzelner Schulen zerfallen, die sich oft radikal in ihren Zielen und Methoden unterscheiden. Diese Schulenvielfalt ist z.T. darauf zurückzuführen, daß traditionelle, strukturalistische und dependenzgrammatische Ansätze den in den sechziger Jahren einsetzenden Siegeszug der Generativen Grammatik überlebt haben, unter anderem, weil sie sich bei der Erstellung von nicht rein theoretisch orientierten Sprachbeschreibungen als handlicher erwiesen. Aber auch die interne Entwicklung der Generativen Grammatik (...) trug zur Schulenvermehrung bei, insbesondere die schon früh beginnende Propagierung von Modellen, die sich mehr oder weniger weit von dem an den Arbeiten Chomskys orientierten Standard-Modell entfernten. Hinzu kamen neue Schulen, die sich durch Methoden und Ergebnisse der Logik, der Pragmatik oder der Universalienforschung inspirieren ließen und denen gemeinsam ist, daß sie dem generativen Ideal einer autonomen Syntax die Forderung nach einer inhaltlich-funktionalen Fundierung entgegensetzten. Das Handbuch versucht, diese verschiedenen Auffassungen darüber, was die Syntax zu tun hat und wie sie es zu tun hat, möglichst vollständig zu dokumentieren, und zwar sowohl unter systematischen Gesichtspunkten als auch im Hinblick auf die wissenschaftshistorische Entwicklung, die von der Sprachforschung der Antike bis zu den aktuellsten Ausprägungen der erwähnten Theoriemodelle dargestellt wird, wobei auch Ausblicke in die indische und arabische Grammatiktradition gegeben werden. So werden zahlreiche Konvergenzen sichtbar, und so kann sich der Leser ein Urteil darüber bilden, ob und wo die Schulendiversifikation mit wissenschaftlichen Fortschritten verbunden war. - Dabei wurde jedoch die Aufgabe einer umfassenden Dokumentation der syntaktischen Theorienbildung nicht so interpretiert, daß alle Richtungen in gleichem Umfang vertreten sein sollen. Vielmehr waren bestimmte Gewichtungen unumgänglich. So wurde der Generativen Grammatik in ihren verschiedenen Spielarten besondere Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet, da von ihr die meisten Impulse ausgingen. Neben der Dokumentation der syntaktischen Schulen ist es Hauptaufgabe des Handbuchs, Materialien über die variierenden Ausprägungen syntaktischer Phänomene in den Sprachen der Welt sowie über Tendenzen der sprachhistorischen Veränderung des Satzbaus zur Verfügung zu stellen. Die Autoren haben sich bemüht, ihre Beiträge auch für nicht eingearbeitete Leser verständlich und instruktiv zu gestalten. Damit spricht das Handbuch nicht nur Sprachwissenschaftler, sondern auch andere Berufsgruppen an, die in ihrer Tätigkeit mit syntaktischen Fragen in Berührung kommen, etwa Psychologen, Lehrer, EDV-Fachleute, Übersetzer, Lektoren u.a.m. (shrink)

A traditional view maintains that thought, while expressed in language, is non-linguistic in nature and occurs in non-linguistic beings as well. I assess this view against current theories of the evolutionary design of human grammar. I argue that even if some forms of human thought are shared with non-human animals, a residue remains that characterizes a unique way in which human thought is organized as a system. I explore the hypothesis that the cause of this difference is a grammatical way (...) of structuring semantic information, and I present evidence that the organization of grammar precisely reflects the organization of a specific mode of thought apparently distinctive of humans. Since there appears to be no known non-grammatical structuring principle for the relevant mode of thought, I suggest that grammar is that principle, with no independent ?Language of Thought? needed. (shrink)

Proponents of the language of thought (LOT) thesis are realists when it comes to syntactically structured representations, and must defend their view against instrumentalists, who would claim that syntactic structures may be useful in describing cognition, but have no more causal powers in governing cognition than do the equations of physics in guiding the planets. This paper explores what it will take to provide an argument for LOT that can defend its conclusion from instrumentalism. I illustrate a difficulty in this (...) project by discussing arguments for LOT put forward by Horgan and Tienson. When their evidence is viewed in the light of results in connectionist research, it is hard to see how a realist conception of syntax can be formulated and defended. (shrink)