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From: curry@hpl.hp.com (Bo Curry)
Subject: Re: What's innate? (Was Re: Artificial Neural Networks and Cognition
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Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 21:22:13 GMT
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: In article <D3n9IJ.GBz@hpl.hp.com> curry@hpl.hp.com (Bo Curry) writes:

: >But the important point about the Universal Grammar is that it is
: >*universal*. This is an observation. If Arabian nomads learned
: >White Christmas myths at an early age, then we might well begin
: >to suspect genetic influences.

Marvin Minsky (minsky@media.mit.edu) wrote:
: I'd like to see a concise list of, say, a dozen such rules.  Then we
: could discuss in detail whether they could be side effects of some
: non-linguistic constraint, say, on knowledge representation or on some
: machinery involved in making serial conversions from one KR to
: another.

See the (rather arbitrary, I'm not a linguist) list I posted for jerrybro.

: In other words, we should consider the idea that even if UG were
: Universal, it might still not be directly related to Grammar.

I'm not sure I understand the distinction you want to make here.
If there is a UG, it's presumably intimately intertwined with the
structures used to represent linguistic and semantic knowledge -
with the grammar of mentalese, as it were. Certainly a lot of the
evidence for one, will also bear upon the other.

You'll note that a number of the Pinker examples I posted seem to
arise directly from a particular way of chunking knowledge.

Bo
