Biolinguistics (E-Journal)
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Evolution, Perfection, and Theories of Language
No full textIn this article it is argued that evolutionary plausibility must be made an important constraining factor when building theories of language. Recent suggestions that presume that language is necessarily a perfect or optimal system are at odds with this position, evolutionary theory showing us that evolution is a meliorizing agent often producing imperfect solutions. Perfection of the linguistic system is something that must be demonstrated, rather than presumed. Empirically, examples of imperfection are found not only in nature and in human cognition, but also in language — in the form of ambiguity, redundancy, irregularity, movement, locality conditions, and extra-grammatical idioms. Here it is argued that language is neither perfect nor optimal, and shown how theories of language which place these proper-ties at their core run into both conceptual and empirical problems
Sex and Syntax: Subjacency Revisited
No full textDespite the sustained effort of about forty years to analyze Subjacency, to date, there has been no principled account, with the most recent attempts faring not much better than the initial proposals. It is also significant that the seeming arbitrariness of Subjacency has been used to argue that syntax could not have evolved gradually: One does not see why evolution would target a grammar with Subjacency, when its contribution to grammar is not transparent, let alone its contribution to survival. As put in Lightfoot (1991), “Subjacency has many virtues, but … it could not have increased the chances of having fruitful sex”. This article turns the argument around, and proposes that subjecting syntax to a gradualist evolutionary approach can in fact shed light on the existence of Subjacency effects. It thereby offers a reconstruction of how communicative benefits may have been involved in shaping the formal design of language
Danish Vestigial Case and the Acquisition of Vocabulary in Distributed Morphology
No full textAs Halle & Marantz (2008: 71) acknowledge, “we have no real idea about how a child assigns features to Vocabulary Items” in Distributed Morphology (DM). Stated generally, how do children acquire language-specific (sometimes variable) mappings between morpho-syntactic features and their morpho-phonological exponents? Following Emonds (1986) in a DM framework, this article advances a testable ‘morphological transparency’ constraint on the acquisition of Vocabulary, and presents supporting results from a pilot observational child-language study in Danish. This constraint explains a significant difference in the mechanisms of Germanic case morphology. By hypothesis, ‘vestigial’ case forms of English and Danish pronouns are contextual allomorphs, with Vocabulary that do not contain any morpho-syntactic case features. Vestigial-case mechanisms constitute a comprehensive analysis of intra-individually variable case-form mismatches in coordinate Determiner Phrases, predicate nominals, and other syntactic structures. Thus, a principle of language acquisition ultimately explains the distribution of case forms both within and across language varieties
On Multidominance and Linearization
No full textThis article centers around two questions: What is the relation between movement and structure sharing, and how can complex syntactic structures be linearized? It is shown that regular movement involves internal remerge, and sharing or ‘sideward movement’ external remerge. Without ad hoc restric-tions on the input, both options follow from Merge. They can be represented in terms of multidominance. Although more structural freedom ensues than standardly thought, the grammar is not completely unconstrained: Argu-ably, proliferation of roots is prohibited. Furthermore, it is explained why external remerge has somewhat different consequences than internal re-merge. For instance, apparent non-local behavior is attested. At the PF inter-face, the linearization of structures involving remerge is non-trivial. A cen-tral problem is identified, apart from the general issue why remerged mater-ial is only pronounced once: There are seemingly contradictory linearization demands for internal and external remerge. This can be resolved by taking into account the different structural configurations. It is argued that the line-arization is a PF procedure involving a recursive structure scanning algo-rithm that makes use of the inherent asymmetry between sister nodes im-posed by the operation of Merge
Internalism as Methodology
No full textThis paper scrutinizes the recent proposal made by Lassiter (2008) that the dichotomy between Chomskyan internalism and Dummett-type externalism is misguided and should be overcome by an approach that incorporates sociolinguistic concepts such as speakers’ dispositions to defer. We argue that Lassiter’s arguments are flawed and based on a serious misunder-standing of the internalist approach to the study of natural language, failing to appreciate its methodological nature and conclude that Lassiter’s socio-linguistic approach is just another instance of externalist attempts with little hope of scientific achievement
