Abstract

Departing from Lenneberg’s biological conception of language and its de- velopment, this paper first reviews select examples from research on lan- guage development and its interface with genetics before making some specific proposals with regard to how the genetics of grammar could be investigated. The central proposal of this paper is that an important, per- haps necessary, avenue for studying the genetics of grammar is to study the genotypes corresponding to phenotypes of child (and genetically im- paired) versions of the computational system of grammar, as opposed to strictly descriptive measures of a construction or standardized linguistic tests. In some cases, these phenotypes have wide explanatory ability, sug- gesting that they directly involve parts of the computational system of lan- guage. The primary example discussed is the phenotype of the Unique Checking Constraint (UCC). In particular, it is proposed that one could usefully start to investigate the genetic basis for he development of finite- ness, object clitic omission, and related phenomena of the UCC. A second, less developed example here, corresponding to a much later developmen- tal stage, is the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR), regulating verbal pas- sives and many other phenomena in children.

Highlights

  • Eric Lenneberg (1967) proposed a view of human language that situated language and its development squarely within a classical biological framework that saw at least some parts of human knowledge as being rooted in human biology

  • Can we go beyond this study and this basic claim about development and the biology of language? Can we create a genetics of language and a developmental biology of language with a detailed analysis of the physical mechanisms that underlie the development of the computational system of language? The purpose of this paper is to argue that the progress that has been made in the study of language acquisition can yield the appropriate statement of the nature of the developmental phenotype that provides a natural set of hypotheses about what should be tied together in the development of language

  • That a standard suggestion that we root the study of linguistic development in results from cognitive psychology cannot be right, if for no other reason than that there are very few results from cognitive psychology that seem directly relevant to what we know of language and its development, at least if we are talking about the central computational system of language

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Summary

A Program for the Genetics of Grammar

Departing from Lenneberg’s biological conception of language and its development, this paper first reviews select examples from research on language development and its interface with genetics before making some specific proposals with regard to how the genetics of grammar could be investigated. The central proposal of this paper is that an important, perhaps necessary, avenue for studying the genetics of grammar is to study the genotypes corresponding to phenotypes of child (and genetically impaired) versions of the computational system of grammar, as opposed to strictly descriptive measures of a construction or standardized linguistic tests. In some cases, these phenotypes have wide explanatory ability, suggesting that they directly involve parts of the computational system of language.

Introduction
Why Genetics Matters
Lenneberg’s View of Linguistic Development
Genetics and Linguistics
Toward a Genetics of Grammar
Unique Checking as a Phenotype for Early Grammar
Genetics of Unique Checking
Proposal for a Study on the Development of Finiteness18
Typical Children
Specific Language Impairment
10. English Again
11. Object Clitics
12. Proposed Genetic Study of Object Clitics
Findings
13. Conclusion
Full Text
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