Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

This article explains the emergence of the language faculty over the years. The organisms are complex and integrated so any adaptive change must automatically spin off structural by-products. Some properties are not selected for and are not accidental by-products, but they emerge because of deep, physical principles that affect much of life. They reflect limits on the kinds of things that evolution can make, and they arise through the interaction of physical principles. Physical laws describe the limits to evolutionary change, in the same way that principles of universal grammar (UG) prescribe the limits to grammatical change at the phenotypical level. The multifaceted approach to the evolution of the language faculty differs from the approach of people whom Gould called singularists. Singularists invoke just one factor to explain evolutionary development that is natural selection. The result of natural selection is adaptation, the shaping of an organism's form, function, and behavior to achieve enhanced reproductive success. Singularists suggest that selective forces shaped individual components of UG, such as the Subjacency Condition, which permits elements to move only locally. Modern Panglossians show that the Subjacency Condition constrains speakers to produce forms that can be understood in accordance with an individual's apparent parsing capacity.

To answer these questions, David Lightfoot looks closely at young children. A child develops a grammar on exposure to some triggering experience. A small perturbation in the trigger may entail a different grammar in the next population of speakers, with dramatic effects. This "" ...

In this book, Lightfoot explores in some detail issues that he raised in an important recent article {Lightfoot, 1989). The main claim of that article and of this book is that the triggering evidence required to set the parameters of Universal Grammar (UG) should be degree-0, ...