Language Evolution and Computation Bibliography

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the general perspective in the linguistic community on language universals. It then presents an overview of the subsequent chapters in this book. This is followed by a discussion of the importance of interdisciplinary research and a multidisciplinary approach towards understanding language universals.

This chapter discusses the usage-based theory of language. It argues that from this perspective there are very few synchronic universals in the sense of features that can be found in all languages. The only synchronic universal is that all languages have at least some minimal derivational morphology. It further argues that language change has to be taken into account in order to understand language universals. Factors relating to language useasuch as frequency of usagealead to grammaticalization, which tends to follow specific developmental paths. It suggests that language universals may be best viewed in terms of such unidirectional paths of linguistic change, driven by constraints arising from domain-general processes rather than ones that are specific to language.

This chapter takes the goal of linguistics to be an explanation of how whole languages get to be the way they are. It shows that some insight can be gained into the forces shaping languages by considering them as products of a historical spiral involving both acquisition and production, learning and speaking, and occasionally innovating, over many generations.

This chapter examines synchronic cross-linguistic patterns in grammars and language use. It proposes that avariation-defininga universals delimit the scope of possible variation across languages. Examples of such universals include the Greenbergian implicational universals and the parameters in the Government-Binding tradition. It argues that variation-defining universals should be understood in terms of performance principles. It further suggests these same performance principles govern variation of structures within languages, dictating that following a verb, short prepositional phrases should precede long prepositional phrases.

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.

This chapter argues that linguistic universals need to be understood in terms of a model of language that incorporates both learned statistical patterns (ahabitsa) and derivations (arulesa). It presents an Analysis by Synthesis model, where sentences are initially given a basic semantic interpretation based on canonical statistical patterns of syntax, but sentences are also at the same time assigned a separate derivation, reflecting the syntactic relationship between constituents. It proposes a universal constraint on language that is necessary for the model to link statistical patterns with syntactic derivations. This constraintathe acanonical form constraintaarequires that all languages must have a set of statistically dominant structural patterns indicating the mapping between syntactic constructions and their meanings. Moreover, it should be possible to approximate the meaning of complex derivations in terms of such canonical patterns without recourse to a full derivational analysis. This approach as complementary to the Minimalist program in that it seeks to determine what is minimally required to explain language acquisition and use.

Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (HCF) proposed that recursion is the only thing that distinguishes language (a) from other human capacities, and (b) from the capacities of animals. These factors are independent. The narrow faculty of language might include more than recursion, falsifying (a). Or it might consist only of recursion, although parts of the broad faculty might be uniquely human as well, falsifying (b). This chapter presents a view that is contrasted with HCF's above. It shows that there is considerably more of language that is special, though still a plausible product of the processes of evolution. It assesses the key bodies of evidence, coming to a different reading from HCF's. The chapter organizes the discussion by distinguishing the conceptual, sensorimotor, and specifically linguistic aspects of the broad language faculty in turn.

Starting from the assumption that syntactic categories can be universally identified or correlated (whether or not they are instantiated in every languages), this chapter investigates the relation between them and their semantic interpretations, focusing on the nominal domain. It considers two possibilities: first, there might be a universal stock of categories from which individual languages might draw; second, there may be hypotheses that all languages must instantiate particular categories. The situation in phonological systems is illuminating: the stock of possible sounds is given by a general theory of phonetics-phonology, but not all of the categories need be utilized in every language.

This chapter attempts to link the specific form taken by the universal grammatical mechanism that projects the finite lexicon of any given language onto the infinite set of strings of words paired with meanings that constitute that language to a more primitive capacity for planning, or constructing sequences of actions that culminate in an intended goal. A central question in defining this system is that of how action representations can be learned from interaction with the physical world. The formation of novel plans from such elementary actions requires two fundamental operations of composition, or sequencing, and type-raising, or mapping objects in a situation into their affordances, or contextually supported actions. It is argued that operations related to composition and type-raising determine the universal grammatical mechanism that projects language-specific lexicons onto the sentences of the language. This observation suggests that the language faculty is in evolutionary and developmental terms attached to a more primitive planning mechanism to which it is formally entirely transparent.

This chapter reports on research showing that it may be a universal structural property of human languages that they fall into a class of languages defined by mildly context-sensitive grammars. It also investigates the issue of whether there are properties of language that are needed to guarantee that it is learnable. It suggests that languages are learnable if they have a finite Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension (where the VC dimension provides a combinatorial measure of complexity for a set of languages). Informally, a finite VC dimension requires that there be restrictions on the set of languages to be learned such that they do not differ from one another in arbitrary ways. These restrictions can be construed as universals that are required for language to be learnable (given formal language learnability theory). The chapter concludes by pointing out that formalizations of the semantic contribution (e.g., compositionality) to language learning might yield further insight into language universals.

This chapter asks how the kind of language universals discussed in the previous chapters might be instantiated in human brains. It distinguishes between ashallowa and adeepa universals in cognition, the former being due to abstract computational properties, and the latter to properties of the neural architecture that supports the function in question, such as language. It argues that shallow universals that are a matter of consensus in the linguistic community should be studied from a neurodevelopmental standpoint to seek their deep (i.e., biologically meaningful) counterparts. Based on an extensive survey of genetic, anatomical, and imaging data, the chapter suggests that the specific architecture of local brain areas (such as Broca's area) is not genetically predetermined but instead emerges as a result of its role and activity, given its particular location in functional networks. A neurodevelopmental account of putative language universals is most likely to be based on organization and interaction of nonlinguistic 'ingredient processes'.

Using the preceding chapter as a point of departure, this chapter offers a critical perspective on the notion of innate universals. It presents a 'minimal nativism' view, according to which a brain area should be seen as embodying a kind of language universal if it is genetically predisposed toward fulfilling a certain sufficiently general linguistic function, for example by virtue of its strategic connectivity. On this view, Broca's area could still count as the brain locus of a linguistic universal, even if it supports other functions beside language.

This chapter argues that the existence of universals in language would only be surprising if the rest of cognition, as well as the world at large, were unstructured. Given that the world is in some sense and to some extent predictable, universals should be sought in the structure of information it presents to the language system. A productive approach to the study of language universals could follow the lead of biology, where looking at the interplay of evolution and development is proving particularly effective.

Natural languages share common features known as linguistic universals but the nature and origin of these features remain controversial. Generative approaches propose that linguistic universals are defined by a set of innately specified linguistic constraints in universal grammar (UG). The UG hypothesis is primarily supported by Poverty of Stimulus (POS) arguments that posit that the structure of language cannot be learned from exposure to the linguistic environment. This chapter reviews recent computational and empirical research in statistical learning that raises serious questions about the basic assumptions of POS arguments. More generally, these results question the validity of UG as the basis for linguistic universals. As an alternative, the chapter proposes that linguistic universals should be viewed as functional features of language, emerging from constraints on statistical learning mechanisms themselves and from general functional and pragmatic properties of communicative interactions.