Publication ｜Sophia Linguistica
Masanobu Ueda
On the Status of Tinbergen’s Four Questions in Biolinguistics and Its Methodological Implications
Classical ethology and biolinguistics both have been formed and developed in the middle of the 20th century under the influence of modern science that was formed in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, and they have close methodological affinities. For example, Boeckx and Grohman (2007) observe that Chomsky’s (1995) five basic questions of biolinguistics/generative grammar correspond to Tinbergen’s (1963) four questions of classical ethology. I argue, however, that a closer comparison demonstrates that there are important discrepancies between Chomsky’s and Tinbergen’s questions, and that these discrepancies imply some revealing methodological differences between classical ethology and biolinguistics as a biological science.
