ABSTRACT

Still, fascinating as this debate may seem to the public at some general level, the question of modularity of language (and most importantly-the combinatorial properties thereof) boils down to the following rather concrete forms: 1 Is the number of (independent) grammatical principles we know greater than,

or equal to one, and are they distinct from other knowledge we possess? 2 Is the number of (independent) algorithms implementing these in use greater

than, or equal to one, and are they distinct from other algorithms we use? 3 Is the number of (distinct) brain loci subserving linguistic activity greater

than, or equal to one, and are they distinct from other brain regions?