Syntactic Approaches to Anaphora
Yan Huang · 2000
Abstract The ultimate goal of generative grammar is to provide an answer to what Chomsky (1981, 1982, 1986a, 1995) considers to be the fundamental problem of linguistics, namely, the logical problem of language acquisition, a special case of Plato’s problem. The answer provided by Chomsky is the innateness hypothesis-the argument that human beings are born equipped with some internal, unconscious knowledge of language, known as the language faculty. The initial state of the language faculty, being a component of the human mind/brain, is subject to a theory of Universal Grammar (UG) which pro vides a system of universal principles, a finite array of which are parameterized. It is through the interaction of the universal principles with the array of finitely valued parameters that both language universals and language variations which are actually observed can be accounted for (see e.g. Chomsky 1995).