Mind Design and Minimal Syntax

By Wolfram Hinzen. 2006

96 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This book introduces generative grammar as an area of study and asks what it tells us about the human mind. Wolfram Hinzen lays the foundation for the unification of modern generative linguistics with the philosophies of mind and language. He introduces Chomsky's program of a 'minimalist' syntax as a novel explanatory vision of the human mind. He explains how the Minimalist Program originated in work in cognitive science, biology, linguistics, and philosophy, and examines its implications for work in these fields. He considers the way the human mind is designed when seen as an arrangement of structural patterns in nature, and argues that its design is the product not so much of adaptive evolutionary history as of principles and processes that are ahistorical and internalist in character. Linguistic meaning, he suggests, arises in the mind as a consequence of structures emerging on formal rather than functional grounds. From this he substantiates an unexpected and deeply unfashionable notion of human nature. Clearly written in nontechnical language and assuming a limited knowledge of the fields it examines and links, Minimal Mind Design will appeal to a wide range of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. It also provides an exceptionally clear insight into the nature and aims of Chomsky's Minimalist Program.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/765b9856bcc6788dfee59fef1a68f163aa1c7adb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cultural Studies

1. Gillian Ramchand
2. Peter Svenonius
3. Boban Arsenijević
4. Wolfram Hinzen

In Language and Linguistics

1. Peter Svenonius
2. Gillian Ramchand
3. Boban Arsenijević
4. Wolfram Hinzen
5. Benjamin Bruening

Citations in the corpus

• On the Absence of X-within-X Recursion in Human Grammar (2012, background): “In line with this broad perspective (Hinzen 2006), we argue here that rather than answering constraints from an independent semantics, the grammar imposes its forms on linguistically specific meanings.”
• Deriving the Functional Hierarchy (2014, methodology): “We call this sort the proposition, though the term has been used for many different purposes by semanticists and philosophers (see in particular Hinzen 2006 for a critique of the Russelian notion of a mind-independent proposition).”