Biolinguistics (E-Journal)
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Syntactic Theory and the Evolution of Syntax
No full textContemporary work on the evolution of syntax can be roughly divided into two perspectives. The incremental view claims that the evolution of syntax involved multiple stages between the non-combinatorial communication system of our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and modern human syntax. The saltational view claims that syntax was the result of a single evolutionary development. What is the relationship between syntactic theory and these two perspectives? Jackendoff (2010) argues that “[y]our theory of language evolution depends on your theory of language”. For example, he claims that most work within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) is forced to the saltational view. In this paper it is argued that there is not a dependency relation between theories of syntax and theories of syntactic evolution. The parallel architecture (Jackendoff 2002) is consistent with a saltational theory of syntactic evolution. The architecture assumed in most minimalist work is compatible with an incremental theory
The Talking Neanderthals: What Do Fossils, Genetics, and Archeology Say?
No full textDid Neanderthals have language? This issue has been debated back and forth for decades, without resolution. But in recent years new evidence has become available. New fossils and archeological finds cast light on relevant Neanderthal anatomy and behavior. New DNA evidence, both fossil and modern, provides clues both to the relationship between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and to the genetics of language. In this paper, I review and evaluate the available evidence. My conclusion is that the preponderance of the evidence supports the presence of some form of language in Neanderthals
What Connects Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics?
No full textThis paper reviews the background, fundamental questions, current issues, and goals of the intellectual movements initiated by Noam Chomsky’s biolinguistics and Thomas A. Sebeok’s (1920-2001) biosemiotics. The purpose of this paper is to give a brief history of these movements, to clarify the common objectives and areas of overlap between them, and to address some aspects of focus and terminology that may stand in the way of productive collaboration among the disciplines involved in the biology of language
Neanderthals between Man and Beast: A Comment on the Comments of Barceló-Coblijn & Benítez-Burraco (2013)
No full textThird Factors and the Performance Interface in Language Design
No full textThis paper shows that systematic properties of performance systems can play an important role within the biolinguistic perspective on language by providing third-factor explanations for crucial design features of human language. In particular, it is demonstrated that the performance interface in language design contributes to the biolinguistic research program in three ways: (i) it can provide additional support for current views on UG, as shown in the context of complex center-embedding; (ii) it can revise current conceptions of UG by relegating widely assumed grammatical constraints to properties of the performance systems, as pointed out in the context of lin-ear ordering; (iii) it can contribute to explaining heretofore unexplained data that are disallowed by the grammar, but can be explained by systematic properties of the performance systems
A Statistical Investigation into the Cross-Linguistic Distribution of Mass and Count Nouns: Morphosyntactic and Semantic Perspectives
No full textWe collected a database of how 1,434 nouns are used with respect to the mass/count distinction in six languages; additional informants characterized the semantics of the underlying concepts. Results indicate only weak correlations between semantics and syntactic usage. In five out of the six languages, roughly half the nouns in the database are used as pure count nouns in all respects; the other half differ from pure counts over distinct syntactic properties, with fewer nouns differing on more properties, and typically very few at the pure mass end of the spectrum. Such a graded distribution is similar across languages, but syntactic classes do not map onto each other, nor do they reflect, beyond weak correlations, semantic attributes of the concepts. Considerable variability is seen even among speakers of the same language. These findings are in line with the hypo-thesis that much of the mass/count syntax emerges from language- and even speaker-specific grammaticalization