Adriana Belletti

On Nature and Language: An interview on minimalism

The roots of the Minimalist Program abl so the system exploded in complexity. On the other hand, at the same time, for the first time really, an effort was made to deal with what has later come to be called the logical problem of language acquisition. Plainly, children acquiring this knowledge do not have that much data. In fact you can estimate the amount of data they have quite closely, and its very limited;still, somehow children are reaching these states of knowledge which have apparently great complexity, and differentiation and diversity – and that cant be.

On Nature and Language: Editors' introduction: some concepts and issues in linguistic theory

The study of language in a biological setting Dominant linguistics paradigms in the first half of the twentieth century had centered their attention on Saussurean “Langue,” a social object of which individual speakers have only a partial mastery. Ever since the 1950s, generative grammar shifted the focus of linguistic research onto the systems of linguistic knowledge possessed by individual speakers, and onto the “Language Faculty,” the species-specific capacity to master and use a natural language (Chomsky 1959). In this perspective, language is a natural object, a component of the human mind, physically represented in the brain and part of the biological endowment of the species. Within such guidelines, linguistics is part of individual psychology and of the cognitive sciences;its ultimate aim is to characterize a central component of human nature, defined in a biological setting. The idea of focusing on the Language Faculty was not new; it had its roots in the classical rationalist perspective of studying language as a “mirror of the mind,” as a domain offering a privileged access to the study of human cognition. In order to stress such roots, Chomsky refers to the change of perspective in the 1950s as “the second cognitive revolution,” thus paying a tribute to the innovative ideas on language and mind in the philosophy of the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, with particular reference to the Cartesian tradition.

On Nature and Language: Language and the brain

The right way to address the announced topic would be to review the fundamental principles of language and the brain and to show how they can be unified, perhaps on the model of chemistry and physics sixty-five years ago, or the integration of parts of biology within the complex a few years later. But that course I am not going to try to attempt. One of the few things I can say about this topic with any confidence is that I do not begin to know enough to approach it in the right way. With less confidence I suspect it may be fair to say that current understanding falls well short of laying the basis for the unification of the sciences of the brain and higher mental faculties, language among them, and that many surprises may lie along the way to what seems a distant goal – which would itself come as no surprise if the classical examples I mentioned are indeed a realistic model. This somewhat skeptical assessment of current prospects differs from two prevalent but opposing views. The first holds that the skepticism is unwarranted, or more accurately, profoundly in error, because the question of unification does not even arise. It does not arise for psychology as the study of mind, because the topic does not fall within biology, a position taken to define the “computer model of mind”; nor for language, because language is an extra-human object, the standard view within major currents of philosophy of mind and language, and also put forth recently by prominent figures in neuro-science and ethology.

Topics and passives in Italian-speaking children and adults

ABSTRACT Through two elicited production experiments we investigated how preschool Italian-speaking children access the left periphery of the clause with respect to topics in Clitic Left Dislocation (ClLD) structures. Since the discourse conditions of the experiments are felicitous for the production of passives as well, we also investigated children’s production of different types of passives, and how it compares to adults’. A rich and variegated array of results indicate young children’s early access to the left peripheral topic positions—also in a nonadult manner through use of a-marked topics—and preference for ClLD over passive in contrast to adults; children’s early access to passive in the causative voice also emerged as well as use of ClLD with null generic subject as an alternative to the (copular/venire) passive. Intervention locality/relativized minimality plays a crucial role in interpreting the articulated results within the system developed in Friedmann, Belletti & Rizzi (2009) and much subsequent work.

Internal Grammar and Children's Grammatical Creativity against Poor Inputs

This article is about the unexpected linguistic behavior that young children sometimes display by producing structures that are only marginally present in the adult language in a constrained way, and that adults do not adopt in the same experimental conditions. It is argued here that childrens capacity to overextend the use of given syntactic structures thereby resulting in a grammatical creative behavior is the sign of an internal grammatical pressure which manifests itself given appropriate discourse conditions and factors of grammatical complexity and which does not necessarily require a rich input to be put into work. This poverty of the stimulus type situation is illustrated here through the overextended use of a-Topics and reflexive-causative passives by young Italian speaking children when answering eliciting questions concerning the direct object of the clause.

On Nature and Language: Perspectives on language and mind

It would only be appropriate to begin with some of the thoughts of the master, who does not disappoint us, even though the topics I want to discuss are remote from his primary concerns. Galileo may have been the first to recognize clearly the significance of the core property of human language, and one of its most distinctive properties: the use of finite means to express an unlimited array of thoughts. In his Dialogo , he describes with wonder the discovery of a means to communicate ones “most secret thoughts to any other person … with no greater difficulty than the various collocations of twenty-four little characters upon a paper.” This is the greatest of all human inventions, he writes, comparable to the creations of a Michelangelo– of whom Galileo himself was a virtual reincarnation according to the mythology constructed by his student and biographer Viviani, memorialized in Kants image of the reincarnation of Michelangelo in Newton through the intermediary of Galileo. Galileo was referring to alphabetic writing, but the invention succeeds because it reflects the nature of the language that the little characters are used to represent. Shortly after his death, the philosopher-grammarians of Port Royal took that further step, referring to the “marvelous invention” of a means to construct “from 25 or 30 sounds that infinity of expressions, which bear no resemblance to what takes place in our minds, yet enable us to reveal [to others] everything that we think, and all the various movements of our soul.”