Linguistics, cognitive science, and all that jazz
-
Peter W. Culicover
Abstract
The question of whether generative grammar offers insights into the mind turns on whether and how a generative grammar is an account of what is in the mind. A potentially useful perspective on this question can be achieved by looking at a cognitive phenomenon that is similar in many respects to language but crucially different, namely jazz. Jazz performance is apparently rule-governed and improvisational, like language. It is useful to take jazz as the exemplar of a complex cognitive task and to think of language as different from jazz in several critical respects that may account for some of its special design features, as well as the fact that it is acquired naturally and without explicit instruction. One difference that may have considerable explanatory force is that language is used to encode and communicate Conceptual Structure, while in the case of jazz (and music in general), what is communicated is the form itself.
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Editorial preface
- On the status of linguistics as a cognitive science
- Constraints and preadaptations in the earliest stages of language evolution
- Functional organization of speech across the life span: A critique of generative phonology
- Beyond formalities: The case of language acquisition
- What language creation in the manual modality tells us about the foundations of language
- Linguistics, cognitive science, and all that jazz
- The nature of semantics: On Jackendoff’s arguments
- Anatomy matters
- The pied piper of Cambridge
- Lateralization of language: Toward a biologically based model of language
- The science of language
- Attention and empirical studies of grammar
- Psycholinguistics, formal grammars, and cognitive science
- Alternatives to the combinatorial paradigm of linguistic theory based on domain general principles of human cognition
- Subject-auxiliary inversion: A natural category
- Generative linguistics within the cognitive neuroscience of language
- Language as a natural object – linguistics as a natural science
- Contributors
- Publications received
- Language index
- Subject index
- Contents of volume 22
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Editorial preface
- On the status of linguistics as a cognitive science
- Constraints and preadaptations in the earliest stages of language evolution
- Functional organization of speech across the life span: A critique of generative phonology
- Beyond formalities: The case of language acquisition
- What language creation in the manual modality tells us about the foundations of language
- Linguistics, cognitive science, and all that jazz
- The nature of semantics: On Jackendoff’s arguments
- Anatomy matters
- The pied piper of Cambridge
- Lateralization of language: Toward a biologically based model of language
- The science of language
- Attention and empirical studies of grammar
- Psycholinguistics, formal grammars, and cognitive science
- Alternatives to the combinatorial paradigm of linguistic theory based on domain general principles of human cognition
- Subject-auxiliary inversion: A natural category
- Generative linguistics within the cognitive neuroscience of language
- Language as a natural object – linguistics as a natural science
- Contributors
- Publications received
- Language index
- Subject index
- Contents of volume 22
