حسين ملاسي امصع في ضيافة الاديب محسن خالد

Quote: The most elementary property of language is that it is a system of discrete infinity consisting of hierarchically organized objects. Chomsky calls this property “an unusual one in the biological world”. I believe that it is only the infinite nature that is really unusual: the cortex is essentially a hierarchical system, e.g., a cognitive system such as vision is best described in the form of a hierarchy. As far as I know, however, the visual system is not infinite; instead, the hierarchy is fixed, so to speak. Infinity in language is created by recursion, i.e., the possibility of including an XP inside an XP of the same type, and by what might be called creativity, the fact that the hierarchy is not fixed but flexible, at least at certain points. Interestingly, both these properties seem to only exist at the phase level. Inside a phase, the structure (hierarchy) is fixed. (I do not believe that the possibility to “skip” categories, e.g. in the Cdomain, or adjunction, which extends categories, essentially changes this.) If this is correct, then it seems that the essential property of language lies not within narrow syntax, but at a higher level of cognition.