Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

Biolinguistics is a fairly broad research program that allow for the exploration of many avenues of research, including the formalist, functionalist, and nativist, and it insists on the uniqueness of the language faculty or alternatively, nativist about general (human) cognition, but not about language per se. It is assumed that the language faculty arose in Homo sapiens, and fairly recently, that is, within the last 200,000 years. The recent emergence of the language faculty is most compatible with the idea that at most one or two evolutionary innovations, combined with the cognitive resources available before the emergence of language, delivers the linguistic capacity much as it is known today. Biolinguists, especially those of a minimalist persuasion, have explored the possibility that some of the properties of language faculty may have emerged spontaneously, by the sheer force of biophysics. The type of principles by which minimalists seek to reanalyze the data captured by previous models are, quite plausibly, reflexes of computational laws that go well beyond the linguistic domain. All the linguistic models, no matter how minimalist, rely on the existence of lexical items. Numerous comparative studies in psychology reveal that mature linguistic creatures transcend many cognitive limits seen in animals and prelinguistic infants. Such limits are the signature limits of core knowledge systems, which correspond to primitive knowledge modules. Such systems suffer from informational encapsulation and quickly reach combinatorial limits.

This chapter focuses on linguistic universals embodied in Universal Grammar (UG), a characterization of the innate properties of the language faculty. Approaching language universals from a minimalist perspective, it begins by contrasting I-universals (innate properties of UG) with E-universals (universals in the Greenbergian tradition). It argues that even if every language displayed some property P, it would not imply that P is an I-universal, whereas P would be considered an E-universal. The chapter considers the relative importance of the following three factors in accounting for I-universals: (a) genetic endowment, (b) experience, and (c) language-independent principles. It concludes that the minimalist perspective suggests that I-universalsathe key properties of UGamay not be genetically encoded but instead may derive from language-independent principles of good design.