Language: A Generative Reconstruction
Language: A Generative Reconstruction Table of Contents Part I — What a Reconstruction of Language Must Explain 1. Language must be reconstructed from its generator rather than defined by its finished products 1.1 Why “grammar plus vocabulary” describes mature language but does not explain where language comes from 1.2 Why words, sentences, meanings, syntactic trees, and grammatical categories are already generated structures 1.3 Why a reconstruction must proceed backward from observable linguistic behavior to the minimum structure required to generate it 1.4 Why successful linguistic representations must not automatically be promoted into cognitive mechanisms 1.5 Why the reconstruction must explain speech, writing, sign, multilinguality, acquisition, language change, and artificial language within one architecture 1.6 Why every proposed transition must specify what new capability has actually been generated 2. GRM supplies structural primitives without turning linguistic concepts...