Babel's Dawn

Intermediate Syntax

Me Tarzan. — You Jane. Could anybody have ever really talked in that super-simple manner?

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A plausible account of the evolution of syntax is coming into view. I had almost despaired. 

Most syntacticians (I believe) still hold the view that syntax must have come as an all or nothing package, a proposition I consider an evolutionary absurdity. 

Second, even when it is discussed in evolutionary or biological contexts syntax is presented in syntactically formal terms that provides no clue as to how the formal operation can be translated into something important to natural selection. 

Finally, I don’t believe syntax, as formally described, is much of a help to people when they are trying to figure out the best way to say something. I know that whenever I give editorial advice, I talk about a completely different set of issues from technical discussions about moving phrases, etc. The formal system is great for mechanical operations in which the machine has no awareness of what it is doing, but does not really address the experience of using language. If editing really worked best at the unconscious level, all these thoughts about helping the reader follow along should just get in the way. Instead, they help get it right.

At the same time, syntax is obviously important and has to be accounted for. “Syntax” was one of the original categories for posting on this blog, but I have long doubted that I would have much to report. Lately, however, things are looking more promising. I am especially encouraged by a paper, “Sex and Syntax” (here) by Ljiljana Progovac in the current Biolinguistics. 

BioScience Article

An article I wrote about the Evolang conference in Barcelona is available for free online at the BioScience site here. BioScience is the magazine of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

Reality Blogging: The Survivors

Souvenir of the Evolang conference in Barcelona.

Most of the Evolang conference did not consist of paradigm-smashing presentations or PowerPoint shows that pointed in a new direction. The bulk of presentations and poster displays were the result of the normal hard work and fact gathering that is the foundation of scientific success. The professionals on the scene were very much encouraged by the numbers of students who had come to Barcelona, and by the range of their work. More than one speaker professed eagerness to see the results of the work that will be presented at Evolang 2028, but we don’t have to wait 20 years to spot the trends. The conference organizers handed out a book of papers and abstracts (costly, but available here) presented at the conference that provides a fine overview of range of work being done today.

Semantics Returns from the Grave

Barcelona is a modern city that remembers the old. It made a fine site for the 7th Evolang conference.

The Evolang conference in Barcelona that ran from March 12 through 15 gave a strong boost to two ideas that Terrence Deacon promoted as anti-Chomskyan heresies in his book The Symbolic Species: Language and the Brain Co-Evolved (discussed in last week’s post) and Language’s controlling element is semantics, not syntax. For non-linguists this idea is plain common sense, but for linguists of the Chomsky era it is a resurrection as shocking as watching dead Lazarus return from his tomb.

Co-Evolution Idea Won Big in Barcelona

Audience at a presentation of the Evolang confererence in Barcelona.

Last week’s post summarized the outcome of the just-completed Evolang conference in Barcelona by reporting the collapse of the long dominant paradigm of generative grammar founded by Noam Chomsky and expanded by many others. The old paradigm made no contributions to the new results reported in Barcelona; reports often contradicted the generative paradigm; some speakers directly and energetically criticized the old paradigm and got away scott free in the discussions that followed. So what did the Barcelona conference leave its participants to build on?

Paradigm Lost

Barcelona's Museum of Science hosted the Evolang 2008 conference that ran this past week from March 11-15.

The Barcelona conference on the evolution of language has ended and I want to digest what I have learned about the way forward. However, it is clear that the old paradigm of speech is the fruit of a generative grammar can no longer stand. (Generative grammar is the theory launched by Noam Chomsky that mathematical rules and algorithmic procedures can be written precisely enough to “generate” all the possible sentences of a natural, human language and only the possible sentences. In other words, it can generate a sentence like The boy took a swing at the ball, but not The ball took a swing at the boy.)

Neanderthals Had Language

Neanderthals had language comparable to that of Homo sapiens, Bordeaux-based archaeologist Francisco D’Errico told participants in the Evolang conference in Barcelona this morning (Saturday, March 15, 2008). This claim totally discards the older Big Bang theory that said language arose only very recently (40 to 75 thousand years ago), and also challenges the Out-of-Africa theory that proposes Homo sapiens emerged in Africa about 200 thousand years ago and spread over the rest of the world, carrying language and culture with them, beginning about 60 thousand years ago. A new history will have to be written.

Recursion Can Be a "Side Effect"

A second attack on the importance of recursive processes in producing sentences took place today (Saturday March 15, 2008) at the Evolang conference in Barcelona. A few hours after Derek Bickerton argued that recursive processes are not needed to generate sentences, Joris Bleys argued in a workshop that even if they are needed they require no special evolutionary jumps to appear. Recursion (the transformation of preliminary phrases into final sentences by embedding some preliminary phrases into others) can simply be a side-effect of trying to keep linguistic knowledge as simple as possible. If the Bickerton and Bleys papers stand there seems to be no syntactical reason why language should be limited to humans.

Words Are More Human than Syntax

The central event in the evolution of language was not the rise of syntax but the emergence of a modern lexicon, words with properties “typical of any human language,” linguist Derek Bickerton told the Evolang conference in Barcelona this morning (Saturday March 15, 2008). The presentation was offered as a rejection to an oft-rebutted, but still influential paper, by Marc Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and Tecumseh Fitch on “The Faculty of Language” (available here). In its place, Bickerton championed Terrence Deacon’s work that asserts symbolic units are unique to humans and that aspects of the lexicon are genuine human universals.

Apes are Not Us

The role of gesture is much discussed at the Evolang conference in Barcelona this week. The ability of apes to learn some hand signs has always made people wonder how much more is possible. But after a series of presentations this afternoon (Friday, March 14, 2008) I will be hard put to believe that ape gestures have anything to do with the start of human language. I say this despite a very touching (so to speak) film clip showing an orangutan putting out its hand to a fellow orang, who took and held the offered hand. Who’s heart could not cry out Ahh at that scene?