This volume, and in general this moment in the history of science, is calling for us linguists, and especially those of us who have worked in Minimalism, to characterize what it is that our approach has discovered, that we want to embrace and move forward with, and what it is that we need to discard. There is plenty in both categories, and it is precisely the considerations of biology (e.g. language evolution) that can help us weed out the burdensome, damaging (...) aspects of this approach. Too often we linguists look down upon the study of language evolution as some kind of marginal topic that need not concern “true” linguists, and we prefer to just wait until geneticists, biologists, and neuroscientists figure it all out. And yet, it is only linguists who can put forward specific, linguistically informed hypotheses that can be subjected to interdisciplinary testing. The emphasis here is on specific, falsifiable hypotheses, rather than some vague assertions that cannot be subjected to falsification. It is true that many such specific hypotheses will be proven wrong, but after all, the nature of the scientific process is simply to narrow down the range of possibilities. My focus here is on a few influential assumptions/postulates in Minimalism that are particularly harmful in establishing meaningful links between language and biology, and which, both on this ground, and based on more careful linguistic considerations, should be abandoned. I will also point to certain postulates... (shrink)

ABSTRACT In several publications, François Recanati argues that time, world, location, and similar constituents are not arguments of the verb, although they do affect truth conditions. However, he points out that this fact does not decide the debate regarding whether these notions are represented as sentential operators variables bound by quantifiers, as both approaches can be made compatible with such non-arguments. He makes these points using philosophical arguments; in this paper I use linguistic evidence from a variety of languages. Specifically, (...) I demonstrate that time, world, location, and person behave syntactically and semantically the same across languages. Hence, either all are arguments, or neither are; and the evidence points to the latter position. The cross-linguistic data give rise to a generalization, which connects the availability of quantifying over times, worlds, locations, or persons with the availability of indexical expressions of the corresponding type. For example, a language that does not have temporal indexicals cannot have tense. I demonstrate that this generalization follows naturally from the quantifier approach, but would remain a mystery under the operator view. Therefore, the cross-linguistic evidence argues in the favor of the quantificational approach. (shrink)

Providing empirically supportable instances of ontological emergence is notoriously difficult. Typically, the literature has focused on two possible sources. The first is the mind and consciousness; the second is within physics, and more specifically certain quantum effects. In this paper, I wish to suggest that the literature has overlooked a further possible instance of emergence, taken from the special science of linguistics. In particular, I will focus on the property of truth-evaluability, taken to be a property of sentences as created (...) by the language faculty within human minds (or brains). The claim will not be as strong as to suggest that the linguistic data and theories prove emergence. Rather the dialectical aim here is to say that we have some good reasons (even if not conclusive reasons) to think that the property is emergent. (shrink)

This volume is about abstract objects and the ways we refer to them in natural language. Asher develops a semantical and metaphysical analysis of these entities in two stages. The first reflects the rich ontology of abstract objects necessitated by the forms of language in which we think and speak. A second level of analysis maps the ontology of natural language metaphysics onto a sparser domain--a more systematic realm of abstract objects that are fully analyzed. This second level reflects the (...) commitments of real metaphysics. The models for these commitments assign truth conditions to natural language discourse. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

This study investigates processing of interrogative filler-gap dependencies in which the filler integration site or gap is not directly subcategorized by the verb. This is the case when the wh-filler is a structural adjunct such as how or when rather than subject or object. Two self-paced reading experiments in English and Slovenian provide converging cross-linguistic evidence that wh-adjuncts elicit a kind of memory storage cost similar to that previously shown in the literature for wh-arguments. Experiment 1 investigates the storage costs (...) elicited by the adjunct when in Slovenian, and Experiment 2 the storage costs elicited by how quickly and why in English. The results support the class of theories of storage costs based on the metric in terms of incomplete phrase structure rules or incomplete syntactic head predictions. We also demonstrate that the endpoint of the storage cost for a wh-adjunct filler provides valuable processing evidence for its base structural position, the identification of which remains a rather murky issue in current grammatical research. (shrink)

Metaphysics has had a long history of debate over its viability, and substantivity. This thesis explores issues connected to the realism question within the domain of metaphysics, ultimately aiming to defend a realist, substantive metaphysics by responding to so-called deflationary approaches, which have become prominent, and well supported within the recent metametaphysical and metaontological literature. To this end, I begin by examining the changing nature of the realism question. I argue that characterising realism and anti-realism through theories of truth unduly (...) places epistemology prior to ontology, and is unwarranted in assuming a non-neutrality between theories of truth and positions within the realism debate. I therefore propose a characterisation of realism and anti-realism understood through truthmaking. This produces a suitable working characterisation of realism that will be used within the remainder of this project. In the second section, I trace the historical influences upon current deflationary approaches to metaphysics, most prominently those of Carnap, and Putnam. I argue that Quine’s supposed attack on Carnap’s anti-metaphysical thought fails, and show how current deflationary thought, most prominently exhibited by Hirsch, came to focus on linguistically derived concerns over the substantivity of metaphysics. In the third section, I outline a number of issues for the deflationist, and defend the coherency and legitimacy of the unrestricted existential quantifier. Focusing on the linguistic aspect of deflationism, I argue that the conception of language that the deflationist relies upon lacks suitable empirical and theoretical support within linguistics and other related domains. Furthermore, I suggest that linguistic analysis in fact supports the claim that the quantifier carries no inherent restrictions. This restores our ability to suitably posit the unrestricted existential quantifier, as a quantifier wherein the domain is only restricted by metaphysically substantive restrictions. Through this, I argue that metaphysics is a substantive domain of discourse. Lastly, I sketch a positive account of how, under an empirically and theoretically justified conception of language, metaphysics can be coherently held to be a realist, substantive enterprise, contra claims that hold that the nature of language inherently prevents metaphysics being considered to be a substantive domain of discourse. (shrink)

A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment. The first section presents several general observations about language acquisition that linguistic theory has tried to explain and discusses the thesis that certain linguistic properties are innate because they appear universally and in the absence of corresponding experience. A third diagnostic for innateness, (...) early emergence, is the focus of the second section of the paper, in which linguistic theory is tested against recent experimental evidence on children's acquisition of syntax. (shrink)