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Reaction to: ‘‘The Myth of Language Universals and cognitive science’’Richard Hudsonlast changed 17 April 2010 Bibliographical informationThis is a reaction to The myth of language universals (2009) by Nick Evans and Stephen Levinsonx. It is to be published in Lingua (2010), doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2010.03.007. AbstractEvans and Levinson (E&L) present an extremely strong case against the Chomskyan paradigm, but rather oddly retain without question one of its main pillars: phrase structure (their ‘constituency’). They take it for granted that sentences have a phrase structure in languages like English, though not in languages where the order of words and phrases is much freer:‘‘constituency is just one method, used by a subset of languages, to express constructions which in other languages may be coded as dependencies of other kinds’’ (p. 440) They see this diversity as evidence against Universal Grammar, but their argument would be strengthened considerably by a complete rejection of phrase structure. |