Omer Preminger

Generative grammar, understood as a theory of the human capacity for linguistic cognition, is an explicitly modular theory. There are both empirical and conceptual reasons for this. I’ll get to the empirical ones later in this post; but on the conceptual front, very simple and straightforward considerations in the philosophy … [read more] “blogpost: How minimalism hijacked modularity”

This isn’t an original thought necessarily, but it’s one that’s been brewing in my mind for quite a while now: it really seems like many of our (academically-older) colleagues don’t grasp what social media is or what it’s for, or how it’s used by different people. I’m putting aside … [read more] “blogpost: Some thoughts on the recent kerfuffle over on linguistics twitter”

Artemis Alexiadou & Uli Sauerland have put forth a proposal recently for an alternative view of generative grammar, which they term the Meaning First Approach (MFA). The animating idea behind MFA is that the grammar is fundamentally a “compression” mechanism, which maps between complex (i.e., hierarchical) structures of thought on the one hand, … [read more] “blogpost: There is no “meaning-first” alternative”

I was reading some comments by Dan Milway about Chomsky’s recent UCLA lectures, and I realized something I hadn’t noticed before: committing oneself to the brand of minimalism that Chomsky has been preaching lately means committing oneself to a fairly strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Here’s why. Consider … [read more] “blogpost: Noam Chomsky and Benjamin Lee Whorf walk into a bar…”

This is not so much a blog post as it is a collection of things that I think deserve your attention. As you will see, it is quite a self-serving list, in that several of these works provide evidence in favor of claims that I have also been arguing for. But hey, it's my blog, right? 😊 … [read more]