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Why and how the problem of the evolution of Universal Grammar (UG) is hard1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Stevan Harnad
Stevan Harnad
Affiliation:
Chaire de Recherche du Canada, Institut des Sciences Cognitives, Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Montreal, Quebec, H3C 3P8, Canada; and Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom. http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/[email protected]://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
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Abstract

Christiansen & Chater (C&C) suggest that language is an organism, like us, and that our brains were not selected for Universal Grammar (UG) capacity; rather, languages were selected for learnability with minimal trial-and-error experience by our brains. This explanation is circular: Where did our brain's selective capacity to learn all and only UG-compliant languages come from?

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 31 , Issue 5 , October 2008 , pp. 524 - 525
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

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