Andrea Moro - Böcker

Two distinguished linguists on language, the history of science, misplaced euphoria, surprising facts, and potentially permanent mysteries.In The Secrets of Words, influential linguist Noam Chomsky and his longtime colleague Andrea Moro have a wide-ranging conversation, touching on such topics as language and linguistics, the history of science, and the relation between language and the brain. Moro draws Chomsky out on today’s misplaced euphoria about artificial intelligence (Chomsky sees “lots of hype and propaganda” coming from Silicon Valley), the study of the brain (Chomsky points out that findings from brain studies in the 1950s never made it into that era’s psychology), and language acquisition by children. Chomsky in turn invites Moro to describe his own experiments, which proved that there exist impossible languages for the brain, languages that show surprising properties and reveal unexpected secrets of the human mind. Chomsky once said, “It is important to learn to be surprised by simple facts”—“an expression of yours that has represented a fundamental turning point in my own personal life,” says Moro—and this is something of a theme in their conversation. Another theme is that not everything can be known; there may be permanent mysteries, about language and other matters. Not all words will give up their secrets.

This book assembles a collection of papers in two different domains: formal syntax and neurolinguistics. Here Moro provides evidence that the two fields are becoming more and more interconnected and that the new fascinating empirical questions and results in the latter field cannot be obtained without the theoretical base provided by the former. The book is organized in two parts: Part 1 focuses on theoretical and empirical issues in a comparative perspective (including the nature of syntactic movement, the theory of locality and a far reaching and influential theory of copular sentences). Part 2 provides the original sources of some innovative and pioneering experiments based on neuroimaging techniques (focusing on the biological nature of recursion and the interpretation of negative sentences).Moro concludes with an assessment of the impact of these perspectives on the theory of the evolution of language. The leading and pervasive idea unifying all the arguments developed here is the role of symmetry (breaking) in syntax and in the relationship between language and the human brain.

This book assembles a collection of papers in two different domains: formal syntax and neurolinguistics. Here Moro provides evidence that the two fields are becoming more and more interconnected and that the new fascinating empirical questions and results in the latter field cannot be obtained without the theoretical base provided by the former. The book is organized in two parts: Part 1 focuses on theoretical and empirical issues in a comparative perspective (including the nature of syntactic movement, the theory of locality and a far reaching and influential theory of copular sentences). Part 2 provides the original sources of some innovative and pioneering experiments based on neuroimaging techniques (focusing on the biological nature of recursion and the interpretation of negative sentences).Moro concludes with an assessment of the impact of these perspectives on the theory of the evolution of language. The leading and pervasive idea unifying all the arguments developed here is the role of symmetry (breaking) in syntax and in the relationship between language and the human brain.

One of the basic premises of the theory of syntax is that clause structures can be minimally identified as containing a verb phrase, playing the role of predicate, and a noun phrase, playing the role of subject. In this study Andrea Moro identifies a new category of copular sentences, namely inverse copular sentences, where the noun phrase which co-occurs with the verb phrase plays the role of predicate, occupying the position which is canonically reserved for subjects, and the subject is embedded in the verb phrase. The consequences of such a discovery are pervasive. Four distinct areas of syntax are unified into a unique natural class. Along with inverse copular sentences, existential sentences, sentences with seem and unaccusative constructions are analysed as involving the raising of a predicative noun phrase to the most prominent position in the clause structure. In addition, new light is shed on some classical issues such as the distribution and nature of expletives, locality theory, cliticization phenomena, possessive constructions, and the cross-linguistic variations of the Definiteness Effect.

One of the basic premises of the theory of syntax is that clause structures can be minimally identified as containing a verb phrase, playing the role of predicate, and a noun phrase, playing the role of subject. In this study Andrea Moro identifies a new category of copular sentences, namely inverse copular sentences, where the noun phrase which co-occurs with the verb phrase plays the role of predicate, occupying the position which is canonically reserved for subjects, and the subject is embedded in the verb phrase. The consequences of such a discovery are pervasive. Four distinct areas of syntax are unified into a unique natural class. Along with inverse copular sentences, existential sentences, sentences with seem and unaccusative constructions are analysed as involving the raising of a predicative noun phrase to the most prominent position in the clause structure. In addition, new light is shed on some classical issues such as the distribution and nature of expletives, locality theory, cliticization phenomena, possessive constructions, and the cross-linguistic variations of the Definiteness Effect.