Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.

http://www.biolinguagem.com/ling_cog_cult/pinker_bloom_1990_naturallanguage_naturalselection.pdf

Natural language and natural selection

1 Workshop at which this work was first presented (Utrecht, June 22-24, 1994). For comments on this material, we are grateful to them and the other workshop participants, especially Austin have provided valuable feedback; and the comments, questions, and suggestions from the participants in the (eventually joint) UMass and Rutgers Correspondence Theory seminars were particularly important for the development of this work. For useful discussion of numerous points, we would like to thank

/pdf/faithfulness-and-reduplicative-identity-4ruq4a6e4p.pdf

Faithfulness and reduplicative identity

An overview of the basic ideas of articulatory phonology is presented, along with selected examples of phonological patterning for which the approach seems to provide a particularly insightful account. In articulatory phonology, the basic units of phonological contrast are gestures, which are also abstract characterizations of articulatory events, each with an intrinsic time or duration. Utterances are modeled as organized patterns (constellations) of gestures, in which gestural units may overlap in time. The phonological structures defined in this way provide a set of articulatorily based natural classes. Moreover, the patterns of overlapping organization can be used to specify important aspects of the phonological structure of particular languages, and to account, in a coherent and general way, for a variety of different types of phonological variation. Such variation includes allophonic variation and fluent speech alternations, as well as ‘coarticulation’ and speech errors. Finally, it is suggested that the gestural approach clarifies our understanding of phonological development, by positing that prelinguistic units of action are harnessed into (gestural) phonological structures through differentiation and coordination.

https://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR111/SR111_03.pdf

Articulatory phonology: an overview.

Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective. This target article summarizes decades of cross-linguistic work by typologists and descriptive linguists, showing just how few and unprofound the universal characteristics of language are, once we honestly confront the diversity offered to us by the world's 6,000 to 8,000 languages. After surveying the various uses of "universal," we illustrate the ways languages vary radically in sound, meaning, and syntactic organization, and then we examine in more detail the core grammatical machinery of recursion, constituency, and grammatical relations. Although there are significant recurrent patterns in organization, these are better explained as stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the constraints of human cognition. Linguistic diversity then becomes the crucial datum for cognitive science: we are the only species with a communication system that is fundamentally variable at all levels. Recognizing the true extent of structural diversity in human language opens up exciting new research directions for cognitive scientists, offering thousands of different natural experiments given by different languages, with new opportunities for dialogue with biological paradigms concerned with change and diversity, and confronting us with the extraordinary plasticity of the highest human skills.

/pdf/the-myth-of-language-universals-language-diversity-and-its-i1slauuahf.pdf

The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science

On the notion ‘feature bundle’ The study of the phonological aspect of human speech has advanced greatly over the past decades as a result of one of the fundamental discoveries of modern linguistics – the fact that phonological segments, or phonemes, are not the ultimate constituents of phonological analysis, but factor into smaller, simultaneous properties or features. The apparently vast number of speech sounds found in the languages of the world turn out to be surface-level realisations of a limited number of combinations of a very small set of such features – some twenty or so, in current analyses. This conclusion is strongly supported by the similar patterning of speech sounds in language after language, and by many extragrammatical features of language use, such as patterns of acquisition, language disablement and language change.

The geometry of phonological features

This work introduces a new approach to syllable representation. It proposes an additional level of phonological representation, the CV-tier; which defines functional positions within the syllable. The first three chapters provide an explanation of and support far this new approach from a typologically varied selection of languages, including English, Turkish, Finnish, French, Spanish, and Danish. The last two chapters are devoted to an in-depth application of the theory of Klamath, showing that a radical simplification of the phonological rules of that language is made possible in terms of this new framework. The book constitutes the first full-scale phonological justification for the CV-tier. George N. Clements is Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at Cornell University and co-author, along with Morris Halle, of the recent MIT Press/ Bradford Books publication, "Problem Book in Phonology. "Samuel Jay Keyser is Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and editor of the Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Series.

CV Phonology: A Generative Theory of the Syllable

Feature economy is a principle of sound systems according to which languages tend to maximise the ratio of sounds over features. The major goal of this study is to confirm the predictions of feature economy at the synchronic level, using an objective sampling technique applied to a genetically and areally balanced sample of the world's languages. It also shows that feature economy can be used as a tool in phonological feature analysis, and offers voiced aspirates, voiceless sonorants and various types of glottalised sounds as illustrations. Feature economy applies not only to distinctive feature values, but to redundant values of features that are distinctive or phonologically active elsewhere in the system. Feature economy cannot be reduced to a purely phonetic principle of gesture economy, but may reflect a general principle of linguistic organisation according to which the active categories of a grammatical system tend to be used to maximal effect.

/pdf/feature-economy-in-sound-systems-sxxv1wbj26.pdf

George N. Clements

Papers

The geometry of phonological features

CV Phonology: A Generative Theory of the Syllable

Feature economy in sound systems

Downstep and high raising: interacting factors in Yoruba tone production

Autosegmental Studies in Bantu Tone