Di Sciullo Anna Maria (Editor). Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar: Essays on interfaces

John Benjamins, 2012. — vi, 367 pages. — (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today). — ISBN: 978-90-272-7341-3.The theoretical proposals brought forward in this book as well as the results from the reported experimental studies present genuine contributions to the biolinguistic program. The papers contribute to our understanding of the properties of the computations and the representations derived by the language faculty, viewed as an organism of human biological. Towards a Biolinguistic Understanding of Grammar: Essays on Interfaces adds to the usual notion of interfaces, which is generally understood as the connection between syntax and the semantic system, between phonology and the sensorimotor system. It raises novel interface questions about how these connections are at all possible within the biolinguistic program. It anchors the formal properties of grammar at the interfaces between language and biology, language and experience, bringing about language acquisition and language variation, and it also explores the interaction of grammar with the factors reducing complexity. This book aims to bring about further understanding of the interfaces of the grammar in a broader biolinguistic sense. Written in a language accessible to a wide audience, this book will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive science, biology, and natural language processing.Interfaces in a biolinguistic perspective
Syntax, semantics
Single cycle syntax and a constraint on quantifier lowering
A constraint on remnant movement
Language and conceptual reanalysis
Features and interfaces
Decomposing force
Function without content: Evidence from Greek subjunctive na
The association of sound with meaning: Th case of telicity
Phonology, syntax
Towards a bottom-up approach to phonological typology
The emergence of phonological forms
Language development
Non-native acquisition and language design
Interface ingredients of dialect design: Bi-x, socio-syntax of development, and the grammar of Cypriot Greek
Experimental studies
What sign languages show: Neurobiological bases of visual phonology
Indeterminacy and coercion effects: Minimal representations with pragmatic enrichment
Computation with doubling constituents: Pronouns and antecedents in phase theory
Concealed reference-set computation: How syntax escapes the parser’s clutches