Universal top-down sentence generation, different degrees of marginality with cross-linguistic non-constituent conjuncts, and the spectrums of semantic and phonological deviations found with the second morpheme of the...Universal top-down sentence generation, different degrees of marginality with cross-linguistic non-constituent conjuncts, and the spectrums of semantic and phonological deviations found with the second morpheme of the Chinese resultative compounds are the three phenomena examined in this paper. They also share two characteristics: being largely ignored or dismissed in biolinguistic research, and having counterparts in biology which have received proper attention and contributed to the knowledge base of the latter fi eld. Demonstrating how paying due attention to these linguistic phenomena may be fruitful for the theory of language, we argue that biolinguistics can benefi t from taking biology as a role model when it comes both to research methodology and to dealing with apparently messy facts.展开更多
文摘Universal top-down sentence generation, different degrees of marginality with cross-linguistic non-constituent conjuncts, and the spectrums of semantic and phonological deviations found with the second morpheme of the Chinese resultative compounds are the three phenomena examined in this paper. They also share two characteristics: being largely ignored or dismissed in biolinguistic research, and having counterparts in biology which have received proper attention and contributed to the knowledge base of the latter fi eld. Demonstrating how paying due attention to these linguistic phenomena may be fruitful for the theory of language, we argue that biolinguistics can benefi t from taking biology as a role model when it comes both to research methodology and to dealing with apparently messy facts.
