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• Language evolution: the syntax rubicon is a mirage

Web page

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/people/profile/maggie.tallerman

Submitter

Luke Goater

It has become axiomatic within Minimalist circles that the genetically-determined aspects of the language faculty are extremely limited, most likely consisting of a single syntactic principle, Merge (e.g. Chomsky 2005). Features once considered to be part of Universal Grammar, therefore under genetic control, are now assumed to be due to ‘third factor’ effects (Chomsky 2005, 2010) – the result of natural or physical laws of form, rather than traits that are part of the language faculty itself, and which thus need to be accounted for in terms of natural selection. Minimalist theorizing also proposes that language is a very recent phenomenon, a rubicon that was only crossed around 150 thousand years after the speciation of Homo sapiens, which itself occurred c. 195 kya (thousand years ago). For example, Berwick & Chomsky (2011: 27) suggest that ‘the generative procedure [i.e. Merge, MT] [...] emerged some time in the 50,000 – 100,000 year range [...] presumably involving some slight rewiring of the brain’. Moreover, the language faculty owes its origins to an internal ‘language of thought’, which only subsequently became externalized and thus used for communicative purposes.

Along with these claims, Minimalist theorists strongly deny the existence of a pre-syntactic (or semi-syntactic) protolanguage stage in the evolution of the language faculty: ‘there is no room in this picture for any precursors to language – say a language-like system with only short sentences’ (Berwick & Chomsky 2011: 31). The reason for this is that Merge is an all-or-nothing concept: Berwick (2011: 99) claims that ‘there is no possibility of an intermediate language between a non-combinatorial syntax and full natural language syntax – one either has Merge in all its generative glory, or one has effectively no combinatorial syntax at all’.

Here, I challenge both the idea that there was a recent syntax saltation – a vast rubicon to be crossed catastrophically – and the idea that the language faculty initially arose to support thought. I also defend a gradualist approach to the evolution of syntax, more in keeping with general neo-Darwinian principles. Under this scenario, forms of protolanguage used for communication became increasingly more sophisticated syntactically, and though Merge is a crucial development, it was merely one of many steps along the way to fully-fledged syntax – and probably not even the final step.