A Cartesian Dream

One way of viewing Andrea’s work is as a substantial contribution to Cartesian linguistics, the central doctrine of which is that “the general features of grammatical structure are common to all languages and reflect certain fundamental properties of the mind” (Chomsky 2009: p. 98). Not only does his work help us to better understand the “general features of grammatical structure”; it also provides a precise characterization of the relationship between such features and the “fundamental properties of the mind” - now to be understood in neurobiological terms. Thus, rather than attempting a summary of all of Andrea’s linguistic and neurolinguistic works, in what follows we shall briefly illustrate some aspects of his contribution to Cartesian linguistics by drawing connections between his seminal ideas and the crucial properties of Cartesian linguistics as they appear in Chomsky’s (2009) text.