Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

Dictionary of language and linguistics 758Seiler, H. 1978. Determination: a functional dimension of inter-language comparison. In H.Seiler(ed.), Language universals. Tübingen. 301–28.Trubetzkoy, N. 1939. Le rapport entre le determine, le determinant et le défini. In Mélanges delinguistique, offers a Charles Bally. Geneva. 75–82.Zwicky, A.M. 1985. Heads. JL21.1–29.Modistaespeculative grammariansmodularityTerm taken from computer technology for a concept of subsystems with specific taskswhich, due to the fact that they function independently, can to a large extent be isolated.The modular structure of parts of a whole is discussed, among other things, inneuropsychology, in linguistics, in particular by Chomsky (e.g. 1980) and inpsycholinguistics, in particular because of the modularity hypothesis by Fodor (1983). Inconnection with modularity, it has been pointed out that certain impairments of the brainmay cause selective language disorder or developmental language disorder (e.g.Curtiss 1988; see also language and brain). According to Chomsky (1975, 1980),grammatical regularities are not based on general cognitive principles, but on principlesthat are specific for language. Thus, grammatical knowledge (the formal grammar orformal competence, competence vs performance) is independent of other kinds ofknowledge. ‘Grammar’ is conceptualized as a module (next to other modules such asvisual perception) and consists of a set of autonomous subsystems, each with its owncriteria for well-formedness. For Fodor (1983), modules are characterized by the cooccurrenceof the following properties: they are input-systems; they operate withinspecific domains (‘domain specificity’); they operate automatically as soon as a stimulusoccurs, which makes them comparable to reflexes (‘mandatory operation,’ ‘stimulusdriven’);the information is encapsulated so that the internal workings cannot beinfluenced or accessed from the outside, but only their output; they operate extremely fastand with shallow output (e.g. of the sort yes/no); they are considered to be ‘hardwired’with a fixed neural architecture and display particular patterns when the system breaksdown (for instance, due to a lesion). Fodor considers modules to be particular systems ininformation processing. For instance, input-systems in speech perception (e.g. perceptionof linguistic sounds in contrast to non-linguistic noise), ‘central processing,’ likeproblem-solving, which has access to information from various domains, is notconsidered to be modular. For a critical discussion, see Fodor (1985), Garfield (1987),and from a developmental perspective Bates et al. (1988) and Karmiloff-Smith (1992).