Abstract
Two new books—Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing by Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater, and Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky—present a good opportunity to assess the state of the debate about whether or not language was made possible by language-specific adaptations for syntax. Berwick and Chomsky argue yes: language was made possible by a single change to the computation Merge. Christiansen and Chater argue no: our syntactic abilities developed on the back of natural selection for general-purpose sequence learning mechanisms. While Christiansen and Chater’s book testifies to impressive developments in constructivist approaches to language development, it’s not obvious that it has the resources to explain the hierarchical nature of syntactic binding. Despite this, the views have much in common.
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Notes
Note that while BC’s formulation of the language of thought claim sounds Fodorian (e.g., Fodor 2008), they do not cite Fodor here. Moreover, their criteria for concept possession are presumably not like Fodor’s since, on Fodor’s view animals also have a language of thought. Sadly, BC do not say enough about what they think concept possession is to clarify this difference.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point.
In discussion of Kanzi’s abilities, one should always be wary of anthropomorphism—but a compelling video illustrating his comprehension of novel sentences can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dhc2zePJFE.
CC also offer arguments against gradualist versions of UG, but for reasons of space I will not discuss them here.
In an earlier version of Chomsky’s minimalist UG (Hauser et al. 2002), recursion was thought to play the same role that Merge does for BC. Despite the obvious continuity between Hauser et al. (2002) and BC, in BC it is not entirely clear whether Merge is identical to recursion, or just a necessary precondition for it.
I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments on the first draft of this essay, I would like to think Cameron Buckner, Bryce Huebner, and one anonymous referee.
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Moore, R. The evolution of syntactic structure. Biol Philos 32, 599–613 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9571-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-017-9571-5