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This article presents the results of a research that aimed to verify the acquisition of verbal forms related to tense and aspect, demonstrating the results of an investigation carried out after the study of the emergence of verbal structures (in simple form and in periphrastic form -- auxiliary and main verb) effectively produced by five monolingual children, between 2 years old and 5 years and 11 months old, in the process of language acquisition. The corpus used was cataloged by two members of the eLinC group -- Studies in Language and Cognition (in press). The objective was to understand, in addition, to what extent the notions of semantic/ lexical aspect influence or not on the appearance of grammatical aspect marks. This work has two hypotheses: (i) in children's grammar, the notion of aspect appears, more recurrently, before the notion of tense and (ii) when the verbal forms in the present tense and in the perfect past tense appear, the aspect is expressed. Based on qualitative analyses, we understand that the aspect is a category that appears before tense, but, even so, younger children present the tense category in their spontaneous productions, which is in line with what the Generative Theory advocates, which is the theoretical framework adopted to carry out this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his essay Cognitive Linguistics and Autonomous Linguistics, published in the 2007 Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, John R. Taylor suggests dialogue and even integration between cognitive linguistics and other approaches in language studies. Following Taylor's line of argument this article reviews George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's theory of conceptual metaphor. This study intends to address both authors' empirical and rhetorical excesses since publishing Metaphors we live by forty years ago as an outcome of their rejection of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar. Thus, it is expected to further converge generativism and cognitivism, as already initiated by researchers such as Taylor, Ray Jackendoff, Peter Culicover, Alan Prince, and Paul Smolensky. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The metaphysical assumption that nature is perfect has been groundwork for modern physics since the seventeenth century. Due to the success of that discipline, researchers from other fields of study followed its principles, including the idea of nature being perfect. Noam Chomsky's Generative Grammar was a particularly interesting case of such epistemological transposition, which took place in the twentieth century, mainly in his Minimalist Program. In his work, while taking to ultimate levels what he dubbed "the Galilean intuition that 'nature is perfect'", Chomsky proposes language as well is perfect. However, given that in Generativism language is also seen as a biological system, conjecture on its perfection results in a highly unlike assertion that it is unique from a biological point of view, because biological systems are characteristically imperfect since they are results of evolutionary accidents. Built on such almost paradoxical situation reached in Chomsky's minimalism, this article discusses the limits to emulating physics in other fields of study, more specifically in biology and cognitive sciences, among which stands linguistics. As a result of this investigation, this work questions the very metaphysical assumption that nature is perfect, along with ideas from contemporary thinkers such as physicist Marcelo Gleiser. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a set of four testimonies from Brazilian researchers who fell in love with Distributed Morphology after the publication of the inaugural article by Morris Halle and Alec Marantz, "Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection", in 1993. This theory proposes a new architecture of grammar that has a lot in common with syntax and little to do with traditional morphology - for example, the ancient lexicon is broken down into three different lists. Each of the contributors was invited to answer the following questions: (i) What is the feature of Distributed Morphology that leads you to prefer this version of generative grammar to ground your work?, (ii) What was the first subject you explored based on this theory?, (iii) Why does this model seem to you more interesting than the traditional generative one?, (iv) Which subjects did you encourage your students to explore in the past and which ones do you currently encourage? What are the interfaces of the grammar that are highlighted in each case?, (v) Which questions do you plan to explore in the near future? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]