Seminars
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
University of Arizona, USA
Language Evolution in the Minimalist Framework
Studies on the evolution of language have finally come of age, as the very useful recent work by Hauser et al. (2002) aptly shows. By separating a broad, ancient aspect of the faculty of language from a narrower, very recently evolved one, this piece creates a clean research space without clouding anybody's picture. The present paper can be seen as a follow-up in the program towards understanding the narrow faculty of language, taken as the basis for the universal syntax of human languages. We start with a dozen established, to our mind irreversible, results informal grammar and also a quick presentation of the basic tenets of modern evolutionary theory (the result of an emerging synthesis between neo-Darwinism and the sciences of complex dynamic systems). At first it would seem as if formal syntax is a challenge to evolution, but this is only if the grammar is seen at a superficial level of abstraction and evolutionary theory with the eyes of the nineteenth century milieu where it was advanced. Instead we propose to take so-called minimalist syntax seriously, suggesting that some of its metaphors (e.g. a 'virus' theory of morphological checking) are more than that. We specifically link that kind of syntax with the workings of very elementary levels of biological organization, such as the structure of the adaptive immune system and its biochemical base. Just as this sort of system seems to have evolved in large part as a result of intricate interactions between viruses and hosts, so too we claim that the narrow faculty of language may have had a similar, though of course much later, origin.
