Keywords In and Out of Context

I mentioned Chomsky’s “Merge” hypothesis briefly in Chapter 2, but this is another topic that merits (and has certainly received) many chapters (and books) of its own. Some of the more interesting recent articles that have dealt with aspects of “Merge” in reference to the evolution of language include:

Hartmann’s 2020 “Language Change and Language Evolution: Cousins, Siblings, Twins?,” a thoughtful overview of the current “panchronic” approach, which includes the two dominant approaches: biolinguistics, which “favors biological evolution, presupposes innate language capabilities and thus views language as a discontinuously evolved capacity” and incorporates the Chomskyan perspective, and evolutionary linguistics, which “stresses cultural evolution and employs research traditions from cognitive linguistics, historical and comparative typology and anthropology to explore the underlying mechanisms and consequences of this evolution in a synchronic and diachronic manner.”

Hartmann notes that the current division between “biolinguistics” and “evolutionary linguistics” echoes the gap
between generative and usage-based/cognitive/functionalist approaches in general linguistics but there is an increasing awareness that dichotomies like “nature vs. nurture” or “modular vs. holistic” are too simplistic and that many different approaches can be differentiated under the labels of
“generative linguistics” on the one hand and “usage-based linguistics” on the other. He suggests that the empirical turn that characterizes contemporary linguistics as a whole may be a major unifying factor to drive the increasing convergence between generative and usage based approaches, and that biolinguistic approaches have largely moved from Chomsky’s original “saltationist” hypothesis (that a single mutation was responsible for all human language capabilities) to a focus on empirical evidence, especially the genetic data becoming increasingly available through today’s more powerful analytic technologies.

Hartmann concludes that as well as the “important potential for convergence between different approaches and disciplines, there is also one important danger that should be mentioned. In the worst case, such integrative approaches like the complex adaptive systems view of language might lead to massive theoretical vagueness and as such to a largely atheoretical, essentially descriptive view of language and language change that lacks explanatory power. But in the best case, it can help shed much theoretical ballast, allowing for an unprejudiced view on data from multiple sources, which in turn can contribute to the gradual evolution of an empirically informed theory of language emergence and change.”

Miyagawa and Clarke’s 2019 “Systems Underlying Human and Old World Monkey Communication: One, Two, or Infinite,” a comparison of Chomsky’s Strong Minimalist Thesis (that the core of the language faculty is composed of a computational system that contains one operation, Merge, which takes two syntactic objects and puts them together to form a set, {a, b}, and that the recursive application of Merge offers the potential of generating an infinite array of linguistic items, such as that found in human language) to nonhuman primate alarm-call systems, with the finding that the reported vocal repertoires of Old World Monkeys indicate that these nonhuman primates are capable of calls that have two items in them, but never more than two (simple AB sequences), and further that these two-item calls result from a dual-compartment frame into which each of the calls can fit without having to be combined by a combinatorial operation such as Merge. This would seem to support the case for human exceptionalism.

Brady Clark’s 2020 “The Evolvability of Words: On the Nature of Lexical Items in Minimalism” focuses on the role of “lexical items” (in lay terms, “words”) in the Minimalist program associated with Chomsky. Clark explains that the evolution of the language faculty in humans must have involved 3 different developments: the evolution of lexical items understood as bundles of features; the evolution of Merge, a single, simple recursive operation, that puts together lexical items and complexes of lexical items to form larger units, and the externalization that links the syntactic components of the language faculty to the cognitive systems used for sound and gesture.

Clark writes, “A lexicon is a finite set of LIs [lexical items]. The lexicon has a number of properties that distinguish it from
the sets of signals (such as a set of alarm calls) that characterize non-human animal communication systems. Tallerman (2014, p. 209, 210) discusses some of these properties and their implications for accounts of language evolution. For example, unlike many non-human primate call systems, the lexicon is acquired entirely in ontogeny. Further, the lexicon is very large in size relative to the size of call systems. The capacity to acquire a lexicon presumably involved cognitive changes in the hominin lineage. These changes require an evolutionary account.. . any adequate model of the evolution of words in minimalism will need to incorporate an account of the evolutionary development
of the lexicon.”

Clearly, even if we limit “the lexicon” to an individual mind rather than to a whole language, the bar is set very high for the saltationists, though this question of lexicon evolution is certainly being creatively addressed by researchers today. Such creativity is in itself a tribute to Chomsky’s own creativity in transforming the field of linguistics since the 1960s (though of course his original theory has suffered the same fate as those he sought to supercede).