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.
journal_name
PLoS Bioljournal_title
PLoS biologyauthors
Martins PT,Boeckx Cdoi
10.1371/journal.pbio.3000389subject
Has Abstractpub_date
2019-11-27 00:00:00pages
e3000389issue
11eissn
1544-9173issn
1545-7885pii
PBIOLOGY-D-19-00666journal_volume
17pub_type
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