Connecting the language faculty with the external world—An initial exploration of a generative-linguistics-based language model
Drawing on insights from the biological faculty of language,in particular Universal Grammar(UG),this paper proposes a revised language model,according to which syntactic features and functional structures are internalised into the grammatical system when humans,on the one hand,are under the pressure of representing and connecting with the external world,and on the other hand attempt to make the most of their biological endowment of UG.This model addresses two questions that generative linguistics should confront:1)As syntactic derivation is external-world-independent,how can linguistic expressions be used to judge truth value and refer to entities in the external world?2)Considering the impoverished content of UG,which only contains the ability of recursive merge,how can a concrete syntactic structure be generated?This paper also outlines the implications of this model on issues such as parametric theory,language acquisition,and evolution,as well as the delineation of the domain of theoretical linguistics.
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