Tue 13th May, 11.00-12.30, 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building

Carmen Saldaña

À la recherche des primitives, perdus: emergence and evolution of categories in syntax

Ever since Chomsky’s Three models for the description of language (1956), the field of linguistics has taken hierarchical processing and the underlying implementation of recursion to be elements of focus in the explanation of human language uniqueness. The minimal assumption in hierarchical processing is that languages are not syntactically monocategorical. Syntactic categories have been taken for granted to be primitives for derivations but up to date the field of linguistics is pretty much in the dark even for a theory of basic lexical categories (Baker, 2003). This theoretical void has been overlooked by the focus on labelling algorithms (Hornstein, Nunes & Grohmann, 2005; Berwick, Friederici, Chomsky & Bolhuis, 2013) in theoretical linguistics and the consequent black boxing of lexical items and the locus of asymmetry. The project I will present aims to engage in a truly minimal effort that tries to explain the emergence of functional morphology and different lexical syntactic categories through cultural evolution and therefore detach them from what has been referred to as narrow syntax. By doing so, we are committing to a strong theory of phases that takes category-less conceptual primitives as the basic input for derivation (bottom-up). We will then point to Edge-Features/combinatoriality and cumulative culture as locus of uniqueness in human language that allows our species to construct categories in the linguistic system, lexicalise, grammaticalise and more generally develop and acquire language. In order to test it empirically, we designed an experiment within the Iterated Learning Model framework (Kirby & Hurdford, 2002; Kirby, Cornish & Smith, 2008). Results support our hypotheses that cultural transmission amongst humans is enough to show the evolution of systemic syntactic categories. Because arguing for the emergence of categories from this precise dynamical complex systems point of view is arguing for a sufficiently general theory of form, I will also start to explore the relation between visual cognition following and language for the mechanisms behind visual cognition are a very good basis for conceptual primitives and exploring the dynamics of the construction of categories by the modern human mind.

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