Saussure proposed the division language/parole and argued that language can be studied as a formal system. Fifty years later Chomsky declared competence the core interest of linguistics. Although for years Generative second language acquisition (GenSLA) has adopted this view, a number of recent publications poke holes into the competence bubble.…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

Formal theories of mental representation have receded from the importance they had in the early days of cognitive science. I argue that such theories are crucial in any mental domain, not just for their own sake, but to guide experimental inquiry, as well as to integrate the domain into the mind as a whole. To illustrate the criteria of adequacy…

Among known communication systems, human language alone exhibits open-ended productivity of meaning. Interest in the psychological mechanisms supporting this ability, and their evolutionary origins, has resurged following the suggestion that the only uniquely human ability underlying language is a mechanism of recursion. This "Unique…

This paper reports on a study conducted to determine the abilities of children to make optional transformations in sentences conjoined with "and." The subjects were 35 middle-class children between the ages of five and eight, who demonstrated average school achievement, spoke standard American English, and had normal speech and hearing. A…

A review of The Psychology of Speech and Language: An Introduction of Psycholinguistics" (Random), by Joseph A. De Vito. (RY)

Discusses current trends in psycholinguistics, particularly in reference to recent international linguistics conferences. (RM)

The experiments reported here confirmed the findings of earlier researchers that transitive verbs are more difficult to recall than intransitive ones and furthermore established a close relationship between transitive verbs and nouns. Implications for linguistic theory are discussed. (FB)

Defends the idea that language is a unique, genetically underwritten "module of the mind" and considers consequences such a stance holds for the psycholinguistic study of nonnative language acquisition. Supports the position that language, as conceived within the tradition of generative grammar, is unlike other types of cognition and its basis is…

Articles represent four schools of thought in the field of linguistics: structural, behavioral, transformational, and tagmemic. Summarizing structural linguistics before 1956, John Lotz emphasizes the importance of spoken language and the "internal order" imposed upon "physical and behavioral phenomena," and indicates some of the basic beliefs of…

Prior to 1959, Chomsky was a formalist. He retains a formalism in his mentalistic theorizing; he denies that the competence process has a correlate in speakers. Because he has based rules, grammar organization and derivations on the non-psychological process, they are not generally psychologically valid. (Author/RM)

This book is designed to make the thought of Noam Chomsky, a scholar whose work has been influential not only in the field of linguistics but in psychology, philosophy, and political science as well, accessible to a wider public than is reached by Chomsky's highly technical writing. The author expresses the hope that this book will provide the…

This paper uses a discussion of experiments with aphasics' use of verbally derived nouns to illustrate how one linguistic model may be superior to another in accounting for the facts of verbal behavior. The models involved are the transformational, which relates derived nominals to their source verb and lists only the verb in the lexicon, and the…

This is an attempt to compile, from public sources, as complete a bibliography as possible of works related to linguistics and having to do with transformational generative grammar. The arrangement is alphabetical by author and chronological by publication or delivery date of works of a given author. The majority of items are also indexed by…