Round 14: Tossup 19

This thinker developed phase theory as part of a paradigm whose basic operations are Move and Merge. This thinker’s “normal form” can express context-free grammars, which are nested between context-sensitive and regular grammars in his namesake (10[1])hierarchy. This thinker developed the minimalist program to replace his earlier X-bar theory. Because children have a “poverty of the stimulus,” (10[1])this thinker argued that people have an innate capacity to understand recursive language. This thinker’s book Syntactic Structures discusses the sentence “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” For 10 points, name this MIT linguist who developed the theory of universal grammar. ■END■

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