Abstract
A key step in understanding the evolution of human language involves unravelling the origins of language’s syntactic structure. One approach seeks to reduce the core of syntax in humans to a single principle of recursive combination, merge, for which there is no evidence in other species. We argue for an alternative approach. We review evidence that beneath the staggering complexity of human syntax, there is an extensive layer of nonproductive, nonhierarchical syntax that can be fruitfully compared to animal call combinations. This is the essential groundwork that must be explored and integrated before we can elucidate, with sufficient precision, what exactly made it possible for human language to explode its syntactic capacity, transitioning from simple nonproductive combinations to the unrivalled complexity that we now have.
Highlights
This research program seeks to reduce any kind of syntax in human language to a single computational operation of recursive combination, termed MERGE
Unravelling the origin of syntax would reduce to understanding the evolutionary origin of MERGE. It would render the comparative approach, a key method in evolutionary biology, obsolete: Even if one takes the simplest combinations in human language, according to the Minimalist Program, they will be generated by the same MERGE operation as the most complex ones
It is an empirical question that requires a thorough understanding of the range of constructional constraints acting on human languages and of how communicators understand, recognize, and processes these combinations, both simple and complex, productive and nonproductive
Summary
This research program seeks to reduce any kind of syntax in human language to a single computational operation of recursive combination, termed MERGE. It would render the comparative approach, a key method in evolutionary biology, obsolete: Even if one takes the simplest combinations in human language (such as duck and cover!), according to the Minimalist Program, they will be generated by the same MERGE operation as the most complex ones.
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