Abstract
Ursini, Francesco-Alessio(2013), “Which Model of Biological Plausibility for Language?: The Case of ``What Darwin Got Wrong`` ”, Language & Information Society 19. The goal of this paper is to discuss some of the conceptual consequences of the arguments put forward in What Darwin Got Wrong, for a broader theory of the biolinguistic approach. The book offers arguments against “New Synthesis” approaches to Evolutionary Theory, that are particularly germane to biolinguistic matters. One main contention is that only approaches to evolutionary facts that capture the “laws of form” observed across living organisms can be theoretically and empirically adequate. However, the book does not investigate whether this contention applies to linguistic matters as well. This issue is addressed in the paper, and it is argued that organism-internal properties, which can be captured via the formal notion of “conservativity”, must be found in language as well. Therefore, it is argued that only those lin-guistic theories that capture these properties, be they about syntactic, semantic or acquisition matters alike can be considered as biolinguistically plausible.
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