Peter W. Culicover
Linguistics, cognitive science, and all that jazz
The question of whether generative grammar offers insights into the mind
turns on whether and how a generative grammar is an account of what is in the
mind. A potentially useful perspective on this question can be achieved by
looking at a cognitive phenomenon that is similar in many respects to language
but crucially different, namely jazz. Jazz performance is apparently
rule-governed and improvisational, like language. It is useful to take jazz as
the exemplar of a complex cognitive task and to think of language as different
from jazz in several critical respects that may account for some of its special
design features, as well as the fact that it is acquired naturally and without
explicit instruction. One difference that may have considerable explanatory
force is that language is used to encode and communicate Conceptual Structure,
while in the case of jazz (and music in general), what is communicated is the
form itself.
The Linguistic Review, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0167-6318
Volume: 22, 12/2005
Pages: 227 - 248
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