Boran Berčić, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia

Abstract: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to reflect on the life and work of Dunja Jutronić. I know what Dunja would say – that I had written far more than necessary. I first met Dunja in the second half of the 1980s. On several occasions she gave talks at informal gatherings of philosophers in Rijeka, the socalled sjedeljke. Since she lived in Zadar, she was not a frequent participant—perhaps only when passing through on her way to Zagreb. At that time, she was working on nativism, and I remember her lecture at Nenad Smokrović’s apartment on the city market. The question she addressed is one of the perennial problems in the philosophy of language: Is language innate or learned? Nativism holds that language is innate, while empiricism holds that it is acquired. The nativist thesis was revived by Chomsky with his claim that transformational grammar is innate…