to be listened to

Talk given by David Chalmers (ANU, NYU) at the Moral Sciences Club of the Faculty of Philosophy

Why isn't there more progress in philosophy?

The question of how language is acquired has fascinated scholars of linguistics and philosophy since ancient times. In this talk, I discuss the status of language universals and gaps in relation to this debate.

The question of how language is acquired has fascinated scholars of linguistics and philosophy since ancient times. Chomsky's work on this topic in the mid 20th century sparked a cognitive revolution after which the focus shifted from behaviourist approaches towards mental models positing a richly specified Universal Grammar (UG).

More recently, though, different kinds of objections have been raised to the concept of UG, notably the issue of how such a system could evolve.

In this talk, I discuss the status of language universals and gaps in relation to this debate. We shall see that many things which we might expect to find in human languages simply never occur. These gaps, we shall see, provide quite strong support for some kind of cognitive bias in language acquisition, particularly when evidence from artificial language acquisition studies is considered.

Michelle L. Sheehan is a Research Associate, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.

to be listened to

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