Abstract
Work within the minimalist program attempts to meet the criterion of evolvability: “any mechanisms and primitives ascribed to UG rather than derived from independent factors must plausibly have emerged in what appears to have been a unique and relatively sudden event on the evolutionary timescale” (Chomsky et al., 2017). On minimalist assumptions the evolution of the language faculty must have involved at least three major developments: (i) the evolution of computational atoms, lexical items, understood as bundles of features, (ii) the evolution of a single, simple recursive operation that glues together lexical items and complexes of lexical items, and (iii) externalization linking the syntactic component of the language faculty to the cognitive systems that humans use for sound and gesture. The first development, the evolution of lexical items and the lexicon, is especially poorly understood. A complete account of the evolution of lexical items will state what evolved, how, and why. The focus of this article is the first question: what evolved. What properties do lexical items have, what determines these properties, and what is the internal structure of lexical entries? The article identifies what the key open problems are for a minimalist account of the evolution of words that strives to meet the criterion of evolvability.
Highlights
The minimalist program1 developed out of the Principles and Parameters approach to syntax
Any account of the evolution of words within minimalism needs to address a large number of issues, even if we restrict our attention to just the semantic properties of lexical items
Semantic change, might give us a handle on the distinction between the lexical semantic features of LIs and encyclopedic, 10Glanzberg (2011) distinguishes two sorts of concepts that run in parallel, the linguistic meaning of an LI and the non-linguistic mental representations that are associated with the LI
Summary
The minimalist program (minimalism; see Chomsky, 1995b, 2016; Marantz, 1995; Belletti and Rizzi, 2002; Boeckx, 2006; Hornstein, 2009; Berwick and Chomsky, 2016) developed out of the Principles and Parameters approach to syntax. Any account of the evolution of words within minimalism needs to address a large number of issues, even if we restrict our attention to just the semantic properties of lexical items. Some of these issues are fairly abstract ones involving the nature of lexical semantic features and their interrelationship; others are more specific issues that pertain to the particular psychological mechanisms that ground the relation between semantic features and the extramental world. These consequences are explored in detail in the work cited throughout this article. (iii) I do not discuss theories of the lexicon, features, or feature structures that have appeared in frameworks embedded within traditions other than the Principles and Parameters approach (e.g., Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar; see, e.g., Pollard and Sag, 1994)
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