Rich Languages From Poor Inputs

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona and a member of the Department of Linguistics, the Cognitive Science Program and the Department of Psychology. In October 1975 he organized the encounter between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky and in 1980 edited the proceedings Language and Learning, now translated into 11 languages and the echoes of which still explicitly resonate in the present volume. He is the editor, with Juan Uriagereka and Pello Salaburu, of Of Minds and Language: A Dialogue with Noam Chomsky in the Basque Country (OUP) and author, with Jerry Fodor, of What Darwin Got Wrong.


Robert C. Berwick is Professor of Computer Science and Computational Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published more than a half-dozen books on the nature of language, language learnability, and computation, starting from his 1982 dissertation, The Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge to The Grammatical Basis of Linguistic Performance, Computational Complexity and Natural Language, and Principle-Based Parsing. Most recently, he has focused on the biology of language, particularly the evolution of language.