Variation and universals in biolinguistics, 341-377
By admin
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 followup 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 in formal 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…