Language as a natural object – linguistics as a natural science
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Cedric Boeckx
Abstract
The Chomskyan revolution in linguistics in the 1950s in essence turned linguistics into a branch of cognitive science (and ultimately biology) by both changing the linguistic landscape and forcing a radical change in cognitive science to accommodate linguistics as many of us conceive of it today. More recently Chomsky has advanced the boldest version of his naturalistic approach to language by proposing a Minimalist Program for linguistic theory. In this article, we wish to examine the foundations of the Minimalist Program and its antecedents and draw parallelisms with (meta-)methodological foundations in better-developed sciences such as physics. Once established, such parallelisms, we argue, help direct inquiry in linguistics and cognitive science/biology and unify both disciplines.
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG
Articles in the same Issue
- 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
Articles in the same Issue
- 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
