Five minutes with Noam Chomsky – “Europe is pretty much following behind US policy, no matter what that policy is”

Last week the General Assembly of the United Nations voted in favour of recognising Palestine as a non-member observer state. The EU was unable to reach a common position on the issue, with some states voting in favour and others, including Germany and the United Kingdom, abstaining. EUROPP editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson asked Noam Chomsky for his views on the vote and Europe’s wider response to the Israel-Palestine crisis

Rapid learning of an abstract language-specific category: Polish children's acquisition of the instrumental construction

Rapid acquisition of linguistic categories or constructions is sometimes regarded as evidence of innate knowledge. In this paper, we examine Polish children's early understanding of an idiosyncratic, language-specific construction involving the instrumental case – which could not be due to innate knowledge. Thirty Polish-speaking children aged 2 ; 6 and 3 ; 2 participated in a elicited production experiment with novel verbs that were demonstrated as taking nouns in the instrumental case as patients. Children heard the verbs in sentences with either masculine or feminine nouns (which take different endings in the instrumental case), and were tested with new nouns of the same and of the opposite gender. In both age groups, a substantial majority of children succeeded in generalizing from one gendered form of the instrumental case to the other (especially to the masculine), thus indicating that they have some kind of abstract understanding of the instrumental case in this construction. This relatively early abstract knowledge of an idiosyncratic construction casts doubt on the view that early acquisition requires innate linguistic knowledge

Negative inversion, negative concord and sentential negation in the history of English

It is claimed in van Kemenade (2000: 62) that clauses with initial negative constituents are a context in which subject–verb inversion occurs throughout the history of English. However, different patterns of negative inversion are seen at different periods of English. I argue that changes in the availability of negative inversion reflect changes in the way sentential scope for negation is marked in negative concord constructions. Thus, negative concord involving Middle and Early Modern English not does not co-occur with negative inversion, but negative concord involving Middle English ne does. Changes to negative inversion can be seen to parallel changes in the way sentential scope negation is expressed at successive stages of the Middle English Jespersen Cycle. I propose that the changes to negative inversion and Jespersen's Cycle should both be analysed as changes in the ability of negative items to mark sentential scope for negation. This observation can be formalised within a Minimalist framework as variation in the LF-interpretability of negative features, following the account of Jespersen's Cycle proposed by Wallage (2008)

An interview on linguistic variation with Noam Chomsky

This is an interview to Noam Chomsky (MIT) on linguistic variation

Phase transition in a sexual age-structured model of learning foreign languages

The understanding of language competition helps us to predict extinction and survival of languages spoken by minorities. A simple agent-based model of a sexual population, based on the Penna model, is built in order to find out under which circumstances one language dominates other ones. This model considers that only young people learn foreign languages. The simulations show a first order phase transition where the ratio between the number of speakers of different languages is the order parameter and the mutation rate is the control one.Comment: preliminary version, to be submitted to Int. J. Mod. Phys.

From 'scientific revolution' to 'unscientific revolution': an analysis of approaches to the history of generative linguistics

This paper is devoted to the challenge that generative linguistics poses for linguistic historiography. As a first step, it presents a systematic overview of 19 approaches to the history of generative linguistics. Second, it analyzes the approaches overviewed by asking and answering the following questions: (a) To what extent and how are the views at issue biased? (b) What central topics do the approaches discuss, how successfully do they tackle them, and how do the various standpoints converge and diverge? (c) How do the approaches relate to general trends in the philosophy and history of science? The concluding step summarizes our findings with respect to Chomsky’s impact on linguistic historiography