Linguistics and Some Aspects of Its Underlying Dynamics

2015/12/08 by Massimo Piattelli‐Palmarini, Giuseppe Vitiello · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Language and cultural evolution

paper · pdf · doi:10.5964/bioling.9033

openalex publication_date 2015/12/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

In recent years, central components of a new approach to linguistics, the Minimalist Program, have come closer to physics. In this paper, an interesting and productive isomorphism is established between minimalist structure, algebraic structures, and many-body field theory opening new avenues of inquiry on the dynamics underlying some central aspects of linguistics. Features such as the unconstrained nature of recursive Merge, the difference between pronounced and un-pronounced copies of elements in a sentence, and the Fibonacci sequence in the syntactic derivation of sentence structures, are shown to be accessible to representation in terms of algebraic formalism.

Citations

• On agreement and its relationship to case: Some generative ideas and results
• Problems of projection
• On certain formal properties of grammars
• Three models for the description of language
• Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited
• Movement and Control
• Field Dependence of the Intrinsic Domain Magnetization of a Ferromagnet

Cited by

• Evolutionary linguistics [wikipedia]