Linguistic theory and the debate on the origin of language

Abstract

Over the last three decades, the study of the origin and evolution of human language has attracted more and more scholars from different disciplines, and earned a place in several internationally renowned symposia, such as the 51st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europea, held in 2018 in Tallinn, where a workshop with 13 contributions was dedicated to ‘New Directions in Language Evolution Research’. Furthermore, the question of the origin and evolution of language is a topic that attracts not only the scientific community but also the lay public. According to Aitchison (1998: 17), the renewed interest in this topic was made possible, after the ban of Paris, by the famous article of Pinker and Bloom (1990), which attempted to reconcile ‘natural language’ and ‘natural selection’. This article restored an orthodox (neo)-Darwinian account of the investigation of the origin of language, which in turn – in Aitchison’s (1998) reconstruction – led to the development of a flourishing research field. However, Chomsky (2017:297) has recently contested such reconstruction, pointing out that both European and American structuralism assumed language to be a social entity. As a consequence, in structuralist approaches language was investigated mainly in its extensional aspects, and less so in its intensional nature. This means that, for example, given a category like plurality, it was more important in such traditions to classify the external forms (i.e. the different morphemes) that realize it than to model the internal rules – and, crucially, the abstract representations on which our language knowledge operates – that encode it linguistically. It was only with UG – continues Chomsky (2017) – that the problem of the “Basic Property” was addressed. This made it possible to tackle the issue of the ‘evolvability’ of language in the correct way. But even in the long journey of the generative enterprise, the question of the origin of language gradually became more tractable, as the knowledge of UG progressed, particularly with respect to the pervasiveness and the simplicity of its core operation (see Chomsky 2007; Berwick 2011). In addition, a landmark in evolutionary biology was, in Chomsky’s (2017) eyes, the appearance of Lewontin’s (1998) contribution about the evolution