Abstract
Recently, prominent theoretical linguists have argued for an explicit scenario for the evolution of the human language capacity on the basis of its computational properties. Concretely, the simplicity of a minimalist formulation of the operation Merge, which allows humans to recursively compute hierarchical relations in language, has been used to promote a sudden-emergence, single-mutation scenario. In support of this view, Merge is said to be either fully present or fully absent: one cannot have half-Merge. On this basis, it is inferred that the emergence of our fully fledged language capacity had to be sudden. Thus, proponents of this view draw a parallelism between the formal complexity of the operation at the computational level and the number of evolutionary steps it must imply. Here, we examine this argument in detail and show that the jump from the atomicity of Merge to a single-mutation scenario is not valid and therefore cannot be used as justification for a theory of language evolution along those lines.
Highlights
The capacity for language is a defining trait of the human species
Understanding the nature of this capacity and how it came to be is a major topic of research
A leading proposal on the nature of the capacity, coming from the work of Chomsky [2], is that humans are equipped with some form of innate circuitry that allows for recursive computation over hierarchical structures
Summary
The capacity for language is a defining trait of the human species. Understanding the nature of this capacity and how it came to be is a major topic of research (see [1] for a recent special issue on the topic). As for the question of evolution, in a recent book, Berwick and Chomsky [4] propose that Merge, being such a simple operation, had to be the result of a single genetic mutation that endowed one individual with the necessary biological equipment for language.
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