Syntactic theory is also a metaphor

Frontiers in Psychology

Tommi Leung¹ 

关键词: syntax;    action;    syntax-action analog;    metaphor;    biolinguistics;    granularity mismatch problem;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01554

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Pulvermüller (2013) and Moro (2014a,b) exchange views on the possible relation between syntax and action. Pulvermüller points out that human's action displays hierarchical and embedding properties, analogous to how a sentence is organized by the human mind. His claim is that syntax may not be as sui generis as syntacticians upheld. As more evidence reveals the neurobiological mechanisms underlying animals' actions and perceptions (Pulvermüller and Fadiga, 2010), Pulvermüller expects that mechanisms which describe the animal combinatorial capacity for action can find a meaningful counterpart in syntax. Indeed, this alleged parallelism between language and other cognitive domains has been receiving wider support as the field of Biolinguistics began to take shape (Hauser et al., 2002; Patel, 2008; Knott, 2012; Boeckx and Fujita, 2014). On the contrary, Moro doubts that the syntax-action analog is at best a metaphor. His opposition stems from the observation that functional categories as the major building blocks of syntax are unattested in action. Moreover, Merge and Move (Chomsky, 1995) as two primitive operations giving rise to the hierarchical structure of sentence (in particular form, such as the X-bar schema), are hardly instantiated in action. Since other syntactic observations such as Locality and Island Constraints (Ross, 1967; Manzini, 1992) are parasitic on Merge/Move (though they may be considered extraneous to syntax, e.g., Boeckx, 2012), neither Merge/Move can be realized in the mental representation of action planning.

【 授权许可】

CC BY