LABORATORY FOR LOGIC & EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY, SIMON FRASER
UNIVERSITY
Biology and linguistics
Whence hierarchy?
R.E. Jennings
jennings@sfu.ca
JJ.Thompson
jjthomps@sfu.ca
February, 2008
ABSTRACT
There ought to be no conflict between linguistics and the evolutionary
biology of language (EBL). Certainly no one denies that EBL is the
correct venue for theorizing about the emergence of human
conversation, or that that emergence must be part of the explanation.
There is, however, a tendency in some quarters to suppose that at some
stage of its evolution, language changed in such a way, that its story
could be (perhaps had to be) continued in a new structural but nonphysical idiom. Chomsky, from his eyrie, had offered the hope that
formal grammar would eventually illumine conversation, and others
accordingly took the emergence of syntax as the stage at which to
swap narrators. We may assume, however, that such theorists do not
deny that conversation remained a biological feature of human
organisms, and though Chomsky thought it too heterogeneous for
direct study, others need not be discouraged. Nor need they accept that
behaviourism is the only alternative to formal grammar. Indeed, if the
resulting understanding is to be continuous with evolutionary biology
of language, and fully integrable with biological understanding more
generally, the methods of such a direct study of conversation should be
biological. Between grammar and biology, the differences of subject
matter, method, observational relevance, and typing are marked.
Indeed the connections between the two sorts of investigation are
extremely remote. Abstract grammatical considerations are adduced in
an attempt to speak of individual competence. By contrast, the
fundamental object of a biological study of conversation is a
population rather than an individual. The significant properties are
properties of populations. The hypothesized generalities involve
properties of populations. Explanations of such generalities invoke sets
of populations temporally ordered by an engendering relation that is
itself evolving. To be sure, the competence of an organic population
depends upon individual competences of its members, but the question
remains as to which competences are which, and into what individual
competences populational competences devolve. All individual
linguistic capacities must ultimately be underwritten by inherited
neurophysiology, but there remains as well the question as to how
directly underwritten are the features of human language that figure
centrally in formal grammars.
We consider, from a biological point of view, some recent claims of
evolutionary biology and linguistics as to the nature of linguistic
hierarchicality, in particular to what extent the property is due to the
nature of linguistic populations, and to what extent it implies
competences of individual speakers. If our claims are approximately
correct, then eventually one must ask, ‘With such immediate
2
population-biological understanding, should linguistics not be released
from its early promise, made, after all, in the flush of its adolescence?’
Introduction: the promise of grammar
In his reply to Margaret Drach, Chomsky acknowledges that conversation, even if
it gave way for a time to the topic of grammar as the subject of attention, must
eventually resume its position as the phenomenon of central interest in an account
of human language, A preliminary study of grammar, he hoped, must illuminate
our understanding of conversation, since, as he supposed, the capacity for
grammaticality was a required neural resource.2 Besides this, grammar provided a
set of investigable problems, whereas conversation itself remained a mystery.
The theme recurs in Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour.
[…Anyone] who sets himself the problem of analyzing the
causation of behaviour will (in the absence of independent
neurophysiologic evidence) concern himself with the only data
available, namely the record of inputs to the organism and the
organism's present response, and will try to describe the function
specifying the response in terms of the history of inputs. […]The
differences that arise between those who affirm and those who
deny the importance of the specific "contribution of the organism"
to learning and performance concern the particular character and
complexity of this function, and the kinds of observations and
research necessary for arriving at a precise specification of it. If the
contribution of the organism is complex, the only hope of
predicting behaviour even in a gross way will be through a very
indirect program of research that begins by studying the detailed
character of the behaviour itself and the particular capacities of the
organism involved.3
It was clear enough from the start that Chomsky’s approach would not be
behaviourist. Indeed his new approach was a reaction to the naïvete of
behaviourism, which was evidently too dim a source to shed much light on the
complexities of human discourse. For many linguist followers, behaviourism has
remained the unique and unspeakable alternative to their chosen method, the
whole dark periphery of one foveal vision. For non-linguist researchers, no such
moral clarity is to be had. It certainly does not follow from behaviourism’s being
programmatically worse than the codification of neurally underwritten grammar
that the study of grammar is the methological form of the good. Geoffrey Pullum
remarks, ‘The problem with attempting to describe English without having a
2
Chomsky, N. A note on the Creative Aspect of Language Use. The Philosophical Review, vol.
91, No. 3. (Jul., 1982), p.423-434.
3
Chomsky, N. A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language, 35, No.1 (1959), p. 27.
3
theory of grammar is that the language is too big to be described without bringing
things together under generalizations, and without a theory there are no
generalizations’.4 But for an investigator approaching the more general questions
of conversation fresh from a study of grammaticalization, logicalization5 or
functionalization more generally, biology presents a plausible third alternative
theory that is neither Chomsky’s nor Skinner’s. The competing claims of
grammar and biology as the appropriate medium of generalization are the whole
subject of this essay.
Now no one, certainly no linguist, disputes evolutionary biology of language
(EBL) broadly conceived as the correct venue for the study of the emergence of
human linguisticity. Ultimately, the feature of being linguistic is a biological
feature that organisms of some primate species have acquired and organisms of
other primate species have not. Such a study of human linguisticity more
specifically involves the study of the evolution of the physiology of human speech
and ancestral physiological capacities, together with the evolution of the neural
resources that have supported them. It is likely that one such ancestral
development was the slow accession to bipedalism. Another was the acquisition
of accurate ballistic skills. Of course such reconstructions remain, in some of their
details, conjectural. But conjecture must accord with available anthropological
evidence, the best models of computational primatology, what is known of the
present neuro-physiology of speech and comparative primate physiology. For us
these constraints define two non-negotiable theoretic imperatives. First, our
explanations of conversation must be continuous with those of EBL. Second, that
continuous whole must be completely integrable with the rest of biological theory.
A minimal notion of evolution
Even for the human species, organic evolution continues. Unless the species is
extinguished catastrophically, it will give rise to later species, which may or may
not be linguistic as we understand linguisticity, or intelligent as we understand
intelligence. We can ask, as our distant ancestors could not, and perhaps as our
distant descendents will not: what theoretical language is appropriate for
describing the temporally distant boundaries of an organic species. Philosophers
tend to classify organisms into species synchronically by reference to recent
Pullum, G, and Huddleston, G (2002). “Preliminaries” in Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G. (2002).
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.Cambridge University Press, Edinburgh, UK.
P. 18
5
All of the naturally occurring ‘logical’ vocabulary of every human language is descended from
lexical vocabulary, typically vocabulary of physical relation. All ‘functional’ vocabulary (for
example, that of auxiliary verbs, have, going, will) has correspondingly lexical origins. As a
research topic, the study of logicalization involves trying to formulate the general principles by
which such descent occurs. The general question can often be formulated as a set of questions
about what features of conversation the transmission of language preserves better or worse than
what other features, for example, whether transmission preserves classes of occasions of use of a
vocable better or worse than it preserves the syntactic construal of its conversational
environments. In some such cases, mutations occur which have striking parallels in organic
biology. For a sampling, see Jennings ….., ……, ………
4
4
populations, tigers by reference to recent populations of tigers, and so to regard a
species as a classical set. But a biologist is more likely to think of a species as a
union of temporally distinct populations, and on the biological account a species
will in general be non-classical. Why? Because the closure of a set of biological
populations under the relation was engendered by must in general contain
populations of properly ancestral species. Absent catastrophic extinction,
corresponding remarks apply to the closure under the converse relation
engenders. The resulting union of temporally ordered populations will include
populations of properly descendent species. It is useful to put the matter in simple
formal terms.
A species, St, is S as individuated at a time, t by reference to a population Pt at t.
But diachronically understood, St is a union P of populations, P, temporally
ordered by an engendering relation €. (That is if €(Pt, Pt), then t ≤ t.), Looking
to the future, the species St includes some part of the closure under € of a set P of
populations; looking to the past, it includes some portion of the closure under the
converse € of a set P of the populations of S. To say that the species is evolved is,
minimally, to invoke a real-valued inclusion function ⊑, and to claim the
following:
For Pt, Pt in the € closure of P, if t ≤ t, then ⊑( Pt, S) ≤ ⊑( Pt, S).
The degree of inclusion of a population in the species decreases monotonically as
the population is earlier. If the species S is individuated at t, then presumably,
⊑(Pt, S) = 1; if t is sufficiently earlier than t, then ⊑( Pt, S) = 0.
This minimal definition of evolution is derivatively applicable to properties
extensionally considered. If we take humanity to define a present population of
primates, then the property of humanity is an evolved property. Likewise, human
linguisticity is an evolved property of that primate species. But both the notion of
population and this minimum definition of evolved is also quite independent of
temporal and organic scale. They are applicable to features of organic subsystems
that develop in brief portions of individual ontogeny as they are to global features
of whole organisms on a larger temporal scale, as they are to features of
phylogenetically emergent organic species. On all such scales the definition of
evolved is also neutral with respect to evolutionary forces that happen to be at
work: say, bottlenecks and isolation, drift and competition. Any evolved
properties on any scale can be directly or indirectly studied. The distinctiveness of
orders of such properties resides in part in the distinctive character of its
engendering relation. Thus species (populations of populations temporally
ordered by engendering) engender species, genera genera, and so on up the
taxonomic hierarchy. Moreover, engendering relations of species are themselves
engendered by engendering relations of earlier species. Ultimately, we can say
that the temporally extended bio-sphere was engendered by pre-biotic chemical
conditions and manners of engendering by pre-biotic chemical replications. On
the cosmological scale chemical conditions were engendered by pre-chemical
5
conditions. At the homelier level of life on earth, the general point is familiar
enough in our understanding of organically evolved species where it is guided by
intuitions of synchronic morphological similarity of successive populations ; the
language will be less familiar but no less studiable in applications to physical
constituents and capacities of organisms that evolve in ontogeny, where
populations are populations of parts and populations of abilities. Here we adopt
the language of population and engendering to speak of linguistic capacities at
various levels.
Genesis and Epigenesis
In an individual human organism, the property of being linguistic manifests itself
in two classes of ontogenic features. The first, the class of genetic features,
comprises organic developmental features of physiology and neuro-physiology
that are genetically inherited. At a given stage of its development, the organism
will ordinarily be, in respect of these features, more or less as its parents were at
similar stages of their development. In the case of human linguisticity, for
example, progeny will normally inherit the required ontogenic succession of
physiological characteristics from its immediate progenitors, who will have
undergone more or less similar development. Ontogenies are engendered by
earlier ontogenies. Ontogenies are evolved.
But being linguistic also involves developmental features less narrowly
constrained by developmental features of parents. This second, epigenetic, class
of characteristics comprises those features acquired during the ontogeny of the
organism in response to interactions with the environment and with other
organisms at various stages of their own development. Soft-cranial birth and postnatal encephalization (both legacies of bipedalism) have favoured this class of
features in human linguisticity. They co-evolve during individual ontogeny, first,
as end-user physiological systems compete for available cortical resources, and
subsequently as the organism rubs along within a linguistic community. All of
these epigenetic characteristics are physical characteristics.
Again, as we can extend the notion of personality to a temporal succession of
populations of personal traits of a single organism (its temporally extended
manner of being a person), so we can introduce a notion of linguisticality to pick
out a temporal succession of populations of linguistic traits of a single organism
(its temporally extended manner of being linguistic). As each of us has a unique
personality, so each of us has a unique linguisticality. And in each case, we can
say that, on our minimal notion of evolution, it evolves during the lifetime of the
organism.
The human organism has only two immediate organic progenitors, but many
linguistic progenitors each having unique though, at any given time, compatible
linguisticalities. The upshot is that the rate of epigenetic change in successive
6
populations of individual linguistic ontogenies exceeds the rate of genetic change,
a fact with which parents of adolescents and elderly teachers are closely familiar.
Distinct linguisticalities co-evolve epigenetically with neural appropriations and
synaptic connectivities that draw uniquely upon the already unique initial neural
resources of individual organisms. The enthusiast for the language of
linguisticality may wish to call these temporal successions of populations of
neural arrangements, neuralities. Each human organism has a unique neurality
that co-evolves ontogenically with, among other things, its linguisticality.
Now if we can think of a stage in the linguistic development of a single organism
as a population of features, then a stage in the linguistic development of a
community of organisms can be thought of as a population of populations of such
features. At each level, populations are engendered by previous populations of
features. This is the nub of the matter. The linguistic features of a linguistic
community also evolve, and with them, conversation. New linguistic items are
given currency, and persisting items acquire new physical significance. Linguistic
features of a linguistic community are what they are (a) because linguistic features
of ancestral linguistic communities were what they were, and (b) because of the
particular facts of transmission from one generation of linguistic features to the
next. Moreover, the features we are attending to evolve very rapidly. For these
features, generational changes are reckoned in days rather than in decamillennia,
and a detailed history would have to take into account the interruptions of sleep
cycles, time zones, and mass media, rather than ice ages and population
bottlenecks. Of course, like populations of organic features, these populations are
continously altering, since (like organic features) linguistic features emerge
locally and are propagated.
So much for the theoretic idiom of a biological study of language. We will
eventually contrive to say something useful in it. As a preliminary we contrast the
biological idiom with that of philosophy and with that of linguistics.
Biology and Philosophy
Biology of language as it is here conceived includes the study of epigenetic
linguistic change. It must be evident even at this stage of the account that it
contrasts in subject matter, method, and aims both with philosophy of language
and with formal linguistics. Like the linguist and the philosopher, the biologer6 of
language is after universal features of human language; unlike the linguist, the
biologer of language recognizes conversation as the central object of direct study,
and change as the most important universal feature of conversation. Unlike the
philosopher of language, for the biologer of language, the vocabulary of
proposition, meaning, intention, content, internal, external, representation,
6
We choose the subordinate term biologer (student of biology) as likely to seem less
presumptuous to biologists than the correspondingly superordinate philosophist would likely seem
to philosophers.
7
reference, convention though these words are admitted to informal chat, plays no
theoretical role. It is, however, important as data, for it evidences that we can
successfully use vocabulary in conversation that we do not understand.
Understand is perhaps a further example of such vocabulary; language certainly
is.
It follows that the biologer of language will also eschew the philosophical
vocabulary taken over by linguistics, including the Chomskian account of the
direct object of study, viz., the faculty of (or organic capacity for) language
In the varieties of modern linguistics that concern us here, the term
“language” is used … to refer to an internal component of the
mind/brain (sometimes called “internal language” or “I-language”).
We assume that this is the primary object of interest for the study of
the evolution and function of the language faculty.7
Likewise, we make no use of the assumption of HCF (2002, p. 1571) and, by their
reckoning, of thinkers throughout millennia past, that language is a system of
sound-meaning connections. Nor do we share the assumption that the system is
potentially infinite. We understand the temptation to make such claims, and as
conversational remarks, we do not deny them; we merely postpone them to a
stage of matured understanding. It follows that a biological approach to language
does not share any initial overarching goal of discovering ‘just how the faculty of
language satisfies these basic and essential conditions’. We are in no position to
assign theoretical standing to the vocabulary of faculty or the language of
meaning until we have studied speech as it presents itself to direct observation in
conversation and to indirect observation in inscription. For this we adopt the
neutral biological language of engendered populations.
The biologer’s aim is explanation rather than what philosophers might be tempted
to call semantic or conceptual understanding. Indeed, a study of the
preservational capacities of engendering explains, among other things, why such
understanding is almost certainly unattainable. Of course the biology of language
cannot diminish the intellectual benefits of philosophy any more than the
practices of engineering can diminish the athletic benefits of an energetic heaving
about of materials; it warrants at most a reappraisal of what the benefits are likely
to be.
Conventionality and engendering
Such a theory is a physical theory, for an act of speech or inscription is a physical
intervention with physical consequences. It is also an evolutionary-biological
theory, despite its preoccupation with post-speciation changes in particular
languages in a relatively miniature time scale. But presumably behaviourists (if
any survive) also think that language is physical, so we must say why this is not a
7
Chomsky, 2002, p. 1571.
8
behaviourist theory with a carpet bag of neurological promissory notes? The
reason is revealed by considering the fate of convention in such a theory. While it
contrives an factual foundation of the philosopher’s insistence that the physical
significance of linguistic interventions is conventional, it eschews the
philosophical language of convention. It takes the factual source of this insistence
to be simply this: the physical significance of any particular linguistic
intervention has itself a physical history. A biological theory provides the grounds
of a second-order explanation of that physical significance. That second-order
explanation makes essential reference to linguistic populations.
It is instructive to compare the language of linguistic convention with the
language of biological function. For a biologist, to say that a physical part of an
organism is functional can be at most to say that its physical significance within
the organism is what it is (a) because ancestral parts had ancestral physical
significance within ancestral organisms, and (b) because of the manner in which
the significance of the present part was engendered by the significance of those
ancestral parts. Like as not the organic biologist is as distrustful of the language of
function as the biologer of language is of the language of convention. For the
latter, both words betake themselves among an intriguing class of data:
vocabulary that we are able to use satisfactorily, but for which we can give no
satisfactory semantic theory, but at best an evolutionary account of their
conversational significance. The acclimatized biotheorist will ask: when we have
an explanation of their physical significance, why should we wish also to have a
semantic theory? What work would such a theory do?
We need hardly remark that this understanding constitutes neither a reduction, nor
an elimination, nor a naturalization, nor even an analysis of convention. In
general, no such philosophical label applies to the biology of language, though all
cognates of such vocabulary belong among its data. It simply seeks explanations
of observationally accessible data. Since the explanations that it seeks are secondorder, it takes as a central topic of interest, the manner in which the physical
significance of particular speech at one time engenders the physical significance
of descendent speech at later times. To this end it must attend to the nature of
linguistic engendering. More particularly the biologer of language attempts to
formulate the general constraints on conversational change, and is therefore
centrally interested in the properties of the engendering relations that temporally
order populations of linguistic features. As will become apparent, a certain
amount is already known about this relation and much can be inferred from
historical data. Since our immediate interest is in conversational change, we
concern ourselves with features of conversation that engendering does not reliably
preserve9. That is, we also interest ourselves in constraints upon conversational
constancy.
9
We use the term preserve as logical formalists use it. To say that an operation does not preserve a
value is only to say that there is at least one counter-example to its doing so. Thus, for example,
division does not preserve membership in the set of natural numbers. Multiplication does.
9
Now much of the explanatory power of linguistic engendering derives from the
combined effects of its preservational incapacities over a succession of
populations of linguisticalities. The consequences of some of the resulting
mistransmissions are individually familiar to and independently attested by
historical linguists, those of others not. Some manifest themselves over
generations of users; some within single exchanges.
Engendering and change
We begin simply with an illustrated list of preservational limitations of
engendering beginning with those affecting elements of speech. We omit
illustrations of vocular and consonantal shifts, but it is obvious that engendering
does not preserve even the most fundamental phonic commonalities of speech.
Our list begins with simple elements of speech, but soon brings biological
explanation into contact with abstract grammatical hypotheses.
1) Engendering does not preserve word separation.
a. A numpire yields an umpire.
b. On less [than] yields unless.
2) Engendering does not preserve morphology.
a. Other yields or.
b. Gyf yields if.
c. Butan yields but.
3) Engendering does not preserve scope of sentence elements.
a. Not(A unless B) yields (Not A) unless B.
b. Not(A without B) yields (Not A) without B.
4) Consequently, engendering does not preserve generalizations of use.
a. Unless ≈ and not yields Unless ≈ if not.
b. Without ≈ and not [present] yields without ≈ if not [present].
The foregoing are schematic for clarity. For an example of 4b, contrast the two
claims:
She’ll die without immediate medical attention.
She’ll die without betraying her comrades.
In dialect, the case of without more closely parallels that of unless, except that in
the latter case the and not reading has become extinct, since on less than that
seems (from the written record) to have had no occurrences outside negative
polarity environments. When it (or its amalgamated successor) migrated to nonnegative environments, it did so with the if not reading firmly established. By
contrast, there is no canonical parsing of the dialectic
He won’t pass through the village without I see him.
10
Lexical instances of (4) are relatively infrequent, but they do occur. The American
use of internecine (≈ within a family) is a case in point. That it seems only to be
used of conflicts (One doesn’t speak, except sardonically, of internecine picnics)
is evidence that it has arisen from a novel generalization of its etymologically
grounded use (≈ mutually destructive). One might even imagine as its source a
pervasive anachronistic11 misunderstanding of the characterization of the
Peloponesian War as an internecine struggle. In Canadian English, the verb
phrase draw up as it occurs in the political phrase draw up the (election) writ, has
been heard as the verb drop which now occurs idiomatically if enigmatically in
such contructions as The Prime Minister just dropped the writ, (that is, has asked
the Governor General to dissolve Parliament and set a date for a general
election.) No doubt in the understanding of many it is as though he has dropped
the puck that, when it strikes the ice, begins a hockey match.
A study of logicalization also throws up other preservative incapacities of
engendering.
5) Engendering does not preserve extensions.
a. Butan (≈ on the out[er] side of) applied to physical items (regions,
cities, counties) without physical sides
6) Engendering does not preserve spatiality.
a. Without applied to incorporeals (Pain cannot exist without the
mind.)
b. But applied to institutions, classes, individuals (No one but the
council, but the gentry, but his mother)
c. But applied to circumstances (I would have got through but that it
rained so hard.)
7) Engendering does not preserve grammatical category of sentence
elements.
a. By ellipsis of that, prepositional but yields subordinator but. (He
never comes to see me but he asks to borrow money. / It never
rains but it pours.)
b. Because of (4) and (5), subordinator but yields coordinator but.
(He never comes to see me, but he asks to borrow money anyway.)
c. Adverbial uses yield epiphrastic ones. Contrast She is seriously ill
with Seriously, she is ill.
An eighth more general principle is prompted by all of the entries so far:
8) Engendering does not preserve understanding.
In general we can count upon only whatever degree of understanding is required
for the preservation of compatibility among linguisticalities. Syntactic and
semantic uniformity are not requirements of conversational compatibility. A
difference of syntactic construal can be concealed from selective pressures
11
The war predates any Panhellenic notion of a Greek family of city states.
11
(notably, from correction) by a compensating difference between generalizations
of occasions of use.
In general even explicit semantic misunderstanding need not affect use. For
example a general philosophical audience will readily acquiesce in supposing that
the sentence
You may have tea or you may have coffee
is some sort of disjunction, though they will divide on the question as to whether
it is 1110 or 0110 disjunction. However, neither misconstrual inhibits them
individually from inferring from such an announcement in situ that tea is on offer
and that coffee is on offer. That is to say that in conversation they naturally
understand it as a conjunction.12 Witness as well that the view so common among
textbook writers that Latin had two or-words, whereas English has only one, does
not inhibit their use of any of the other English or-words, such as unless, but,
alternatively, otherwise, and else.13 Compatibility of use does not preclude
misunderstanding of use. Such authors’ assumed degree of understanding is
neither preserved nor, more significantly for philosophy, even vouchsafed by
linguistic engendering. We can go further than this: for much of the vocabulary of
philosophy no philosophically satisfying understanding is available, since the
availability of such understanding is not a requirement of language transmission.
The general point can be summed up catechistically.
Q: What understanding of the vocabulary of a language is accessible
through investigation?
A: Whatever understanding is required for the preservation of
conversation in that language at its current rate of change (in
practical terms, very little.)
Orders of Engendering: biology and linguistics
Every linguistic primate that has ever lived has been descended from wholly nonlinguistic ancestors, more recently from pre-linguistic ancestors, and more
recently still from early linguistic ancestors. In fact, for every available degree of
inclusion in the class of linguistic humans, every linguistic human has had
ancestral witnesses of a primate population of that degree. Linguistic engendering
is therefore itself evolved from epigenetic engendering relations that were, at
most, in monotonically increasing degrees linguistic, and ultimately from
engendering relations that were, at most, in monotonically increasing degrees
epigenetic rather than genetic. EBL gives us episodic glimpses of representative
12
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Honderich T (ed.). Oxford, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995, 2003. Vide Jack MacIntosh, “The Confectionery Fallacy”.
13
Like English, Latin has many words that can be translated into English as or, among them, vel,
aut, sive, seu, and enclitic –ve.
12
witnesses of these very early stages of linguistic evolution between which we can
hypothetically interpolate intermediate stages. By contrast, studies of
grammaticalization and logicalization provide somewhat more detailed
evolutionary hypotheses about comparatively recent developments within
speciated linguistic communities. But again, we can be certain that the linguistic
processes of grammaticalization and logicalization are themselves evolved from
“proto-functionalizations” that were, at best, in monotonically increasing degrees
linguistic. (Hence the continuity of this theoretical approach with EBL.)
It follows that distinctions that philosophers at least have regarded as
paradigmatically sharp are in fact evolved. One such is the distinction between
form and content, however those might be explicated; another is the distinction
between functional and lexical items. Of this latter we have ample independent
evidence in such transitional formulaic devices such as as well as, too, at the same
time, while, plus by which we vary our conjunctions. One might have thought that
since grammatical vocabulary has evolved epigenetically from non-grammatical
vocabulary, so grammatical speech, such as it is, is likely also evolved from some
pregrammatical ancestor, and that that evolution was also epigenetic. We are not
of course forced to this conclusion. However, it is fair to ask of those who would
reject it whether they suppose that some genetic development initiated some first
set of grammaticalizations in some common ancestral language, or whether the
genetic changes that are claimed to have made humans grammatical rather coevolved with the epigenetic changes that gave human languages the very process
of grammaticalization. Again, once we have the language to express it, there is a
reasonable temptation to say that grammaticalization is itself an evolved process.
Those who, reasonably, succumb to this last temptation will ask the following:
What precisely is the connection between the emergence of the process of
grammaticalization and the hypothesized genetic change that rendered our
phonations grammatical?
Hierarchy: Biological or Grammatical
These discussions bring us to our principal topic: hierarchicality. Now suppose it
granted that the capacity for apprehending and producing “grammatical”
sequences (the grammaticality capacity) is a genetically transmitted key property
of human speech. One might nevertheless want to know of what pre-existing
capacities that capacity was a refinement, and what other capacities exploited the
same pre-existing conditions: what present genetically underwritten capacities are
cognate with the grammaticality capacity? Phillip Lieberman has hypothesized
that the “reiterative” capacities of motor control might be one of those cognate
capacities.14 However, it remains a settled habit of thought among many linguists
that the grammaticality capacity is uniquely linguistic, and can have no cognates
of sufficiently recent common ancestry for them to serve a useful explanatory
role. So though one might have thought that what counts as recent must be
14
Lieberman, P. Toward an Evolutionary Biology Of Language. The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts (2006).
13
determined by intellectual interest; (and though equally one might have hoped for
detailed, closely argued biological counterarguments,) one has to expect reflexive
rejection from some contrarily committed theorists. Joseph Devlin, for example,
has dismissed Lieberman’s suggestion on the grounds that a mere sequencing
engine is not ipso facto a “hierarchical sequencing engine.”
Motor actions such as walking and dancing tend to have linear
structure, whereas even simple sentences are based on a hierarchical
structure. Consequently, sequencing in dance and language is likely to
require fundamentally different mechanisms, and equating the two will
be misleading. In other words, it is not sequencing, per se, that is
important for language, but the ability to produce and comprehend
hierarchically structured sequences.15
Devlin’s reference to the earlier quoted piece by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch
suggests that they provide an account of what makes linguistic sequences
hierarchical. Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch give us a prima facie innocent
formulation.
Natural languages go beyond purely local structure by including a
capacity for recursive center embedding of phrases within phrases,
which can lead to statistical regularities that are separated by an
arbitrary number of words or phrases.
Such long-distance,
hierarchical relationships are found in all natural languages for
which, at a minimum, a ‘phrase-structure grammar’ is necessary
(emphasis added).16
Evidently, the hierarchicality to which Devlin and Chomsky allude is a feature of
a linguisticality of a certain kind: one that initiates interventions plausibly
represented as instances of recursive centre embedding. Of course, while clearly
one can have some intuitive idea of the kind of event Chomsky and Devlin have
in mind one wonders what actually constitutes its hierarchicality. The official
answer imposes two requirements. First, the linguistic item must be formally
representable. Secondly, the language of its representation must require
characterization by a grammar particularly situated in the Chomsky hierarchy.17
The significance of this is that a system is capable of conforming its behaviour to
a grammar only if it possesses the corresponding measure of computational
power; hence the initial postulate that the human organism is genetically endowed
with the capacity to realize such a computational system in normal linguistic
ontogeny.
15
Devlin, J. Are We Dancing Apes? Science, vol. 314, Nov. 10, 2006. p. 926.
HCF, 1577.
17
Hopcroft, J. & Ullman, J. Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation
(Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1979).
16
14
We believe that if explorations into the problem of language
evolution are to progress, we need a clear explication of the
computational requirements for language, the role of evolutionary
theory in testing hypotheses of character evolution, and a research
program that will enable a productive interchange between linguists
and biologists.18
Conversation, presumably as it actually occurs, must ultimately provide the data
that confirms the theory. However, Chomsky’s earlier characterization seems to
settle for a rather idealized than instanced conception of conversational mastery.
The behaviour of the speaker, listener, and learner of language
constitutes, of course, the actual data for any study of language. The
construction of a grammar which enumerates sentences in such a way
that a meaningful structural description can be determined for each
sentence does not in itself provide an account of this actual behavior.
It merely characterizes abstractly the ability of one who has mastered
the language to distinguish sentences from nonsentences, to undersand
new sentences (in part), to note certain ambiguities, etc. These are very
remarkable abilities.19
Now that programme, while empirical, is nevertheless abstract, and trades upon a
mathematical understanding of formal language that is unmatched for natural
language. Like other such work20, it raises subsidiary formal questions that might
hold interest quite independently of studies of human conversation. No biological
observations will or ought to diminish enthusiasm for such primary research.
However, a claim that some feature both defines the human capacity for language
and is genetically transmitted is an evolutionary biological hypothesis. It stands or
falls upon evolutionary biological evidence. On the face of it, on such a point
there ought to be no disagreement between linguists and biologists. To be sure, on
the interpretation of evidence there is room for non-partisan disagreement. On the
matter of hierarchy, for example, Devlin is at odds with Paul Bloom, though they
both reject Lieberman’s principal claim.
[…If] aspects of language such as grammatical categories,
constraints on co-reference, and inflectional morphology had
parallels in the motor system, this would support the view that
language evolved out of the speech motor control. L makes no
18
Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002, p.1570.
Chomsky, N. A Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. In Jakobovits L.A. & Miron M.S.
(eds.), Readings in the Psychology of Language, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 142-143.
20
Modal and Deontic logic, for example, owe such a debt to a remark of Saul Kripke’s (1963).
But there is by no means unanimity among recent deontic logicians on the question of
applicability of their work to moral discourse. Their studies of weak modal logics and their model
theory often finds mathematical motivations that precede the meta-ethical apologetics of their
published form. The probable character of future applications amply justifies the label ‘primary
research’.
19
15
argument for such parallels; indeed, once one put aside gross
commonalities such as hierarchical structure and sequencing
(properties that are shared by virtually all complex systems), these
domains have nothing in common.21
By contrast, the role of representability in the argument marks a methodological
separation of biology of language both from present attitudes of philosophy and
from those of linguistics. That role is well understood as it applies to formal
languages, which are mathematical objects. That, for example, the language of
orthologic is representable in the language of Brouwersche modal logic22, is
demonstrable by a mathematical induction that depends upon the recursive
definitions of the languages. But we have to remind ourselves that the
corresponding linguistic claims rest not upon a satisfactory understanding of
natural language, but upon an undefined synchronic abstraction to which the
diachronic preoccupations of the biology of language are deemed irrelevant.
To illustrate, one might insist, as Grice does, that all English uses of or can be
represented by propositional disjunction. To accommodate the conjunctive
character of
You can have pale ale or you can have lager
one might have to hypothesize the implicit present of universal quantification
over disjunctive states. But a biologer of language is likely to be less impressed
by the representability of such a sentence by a construction that involves
disjunction than he is by an explanation of how such a use of or has come about.
After all, if we stipulate particular readings of or and and, by reference to ∨ and
∧, then every indicative sentence that can be assumed to have a truth value is
representable as a disjunction, alternatively as a conjunction, simply by recourse
to natural counterparts of disjunctive and conjunctive normal forms.
The requirement of such stipulation brings another difficulty to the fore. The
language of form has well-defined, purely syntactic application in formal
languages, where the form of a string can be identified with the set of its uniform
substitutions. There is no such thing as the intrinsic syntactic form of a natural
language sentence. Representation of a natural sentence as a logical form requires
an antecedent judgement about its meaning. In a physical theory of language,
meaning, while it might conversationally distinguish one use from another, plays
no explanatory role and does not figure in the language of the theory. If an
ideology is at work in this omission, it is the background assumption that physical
explanation (even higher-order physical explanation) is always in principle
21
Bloom, P. Language, vol 68, no. 2, Jun. (1992), pp. 328-387. Review of Lieberman, P.
Uniquely Human: The evolution of speech, thought, and selfless behaviour. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 383.
22
R.I. Goldblatt. Semantic analysis of orthologic. Journal of Philosophical Logic 3, 1974,
19-35.
16
available. It is coupled with the studied avoidance of a priori assumptions about
the availability of semantic representation.
Setting aside questions of representational forms of sentences, there are sufficient
biological grounds for questioning even the notion of sentence, for presumably
the property of constituting a sentence, if it is not entirely a fiction, is an evolved
property of phonemic streams. Even on the intuitive understanding of sentence,
we speak in partial sentences and perform running repairs and alterations upon
our own and others’. And against the abstract contrast between competence and
performance, we can set causal relationships between present and ancestral use.
Consider, for example, Philip Marlowe’s
His face was stiff with thought or with something that made his face stiff.23
Some might be inclined to say that it takes a conversational liberty with
disjunctive form. But from a biological point of view we cannot rule out that it is
a surviving discourse-punctuational use of or: that is, that the or punctuates two
attempts at getting a matter right, the first of which was neurally prepared earlier
than and independently of its refinement. We cannot say whether discoursepunctuational uses of a particular particle such as or precede connective uses, nor
whether unanticipated uses precede anticipated ones. (Evidently the two divisions
need not coincide.) But on a larger evolutionary scale, it would seem likely that
punctuated successions of simple acts preceded complex single acts. We can
safely remark that it is only a theoretical bias in favour of atemporal grammatical
structure over temporally punctuated acts of speech that inclines one to take the
one as primary and the other as derivative. Whichever came first in any particular
case, its monopoly has not been preserved by linguistic engendering. Moreover,
English and other languages have acquired markers (either…or, both…and,
ētoi…ē, ē…ē, kai…kai, aut…aut, vel…vel, et…et, and so on) for anticipated uses.
If this account is correct, we may reasonably ask whether at least some complex
sentence-types evolved from complex assertion types. Among these complex
sentence-types would be conditionals, conjunctions, disjunctions, and negations.
Compositionality
The question as to what resources underwrite recursive centre embedding is best
approached via a somewhat broader question: what more generally are the
resources for effective speech production and how do we come by them? We take
the question of compositionality as an instructive point of departure.
An initial remark. In speaking of speech production there is good reason to avoid
vocabulary that suggests an unwarranted degree of deliberateness. 24 To be sure,
23
Chandler. The High Window. New York, 1942, p43.
It is interesting to reflect that if utterances flow from deliberation, then for the most part the
deliberation from which they flow provides an excellent example of Bermudez’ deliberation
without language.
24
17
speech can be deliberate. When Clarence Thomas testified to the Senate Judiciary
Committee that he had never done anything that could be mistaken for sexual
harrassment (which is to say that any sexual harrassment that he had committed
had been obviously sexual harrassment) we can assume that he was speaking
deliberately. But in general, the details of speech production are not deliberate.
We need neither know what we are about to utter, nor be able to reproduce recent
utterances. Much the same can be said, mutatis mutandis, of most activities
involving articulated motion, such as chopping wood, or performing a musical
composition, or walking. To say that portions of speech are composed will
suggest to some that composing a sentence is like composing a concerto, that
those portions persist for examination after composition, as though speech were
inscription. In general this is not true. We do better to speak simply of production.
By contrast, the language of composition is well suited to descriptions of formal
languages, where the recursive definition of well-formedness is explicitly about
permissable inscriptions, not about permissible inscribing activities: about
products, not about their production. Certainly if we are very practised we can
start at the beginning of a long wff, and write down its components from left to
right without revision: it is impressive to watch such an inscription, even in Polish
notation, as anyone who has attended an Arthur Prior lecture can attest, but the
rules are indifferent to the temporal order of commission. The definition permits
us to check an existing string for well-formedness independently of the manner of
its inscribing. What decides between well- and ill-formedness is whether a string
could be produced in accordance with specified closure conditions, not whether it
actually was. The compositionality of a formal language amounts to its sentences’
being representable as having been composed in a particular way. One need not
assume that neural resources brought into play by the test are those neural
resources brought into play by the production.
Now the compositionality of a formal language, guaranteed by a recursive
definition of the set of its sentences confers a benefit for the definition of
satisfaction for its sentences, since the truth definition induces along the wellformedness definition. In typical cases it enables us to compute the truth-value of
the sentence from truth-values of atoms. Although no one has yet satisfactorily
formulated one, some such property as compositionality hypothesized of natural
language is taken by some to explain both a speaker’s capacity for production of,
and a hearer’s capacity for apprehension of an unlimited variety of sentences from
a strictly finite repertoire of constitutive parts. Consider what is regarded as the
corresponding feature of a formal language such as that of first-order logic. We
may disregard the fact that a denumerable collection of atoms in itself guarantees
for every sentence of the language an infinite set of alphabetic variants. Disregard
too the fact that closure under uniform substitution provides for every sentence of
the language an infinite set of substitution instances. Even when we identify the
form of a sentence with the set of its substitution-instances, such a formal
language will have infinitely many distinct forms: even infinitely many logically
inequivalent forms. But what buys this infinite variety is closure of the set of
18
sentences under its defining set of grammatical operations, which also guarantees
the existence, as elements of the language, of sentences of every finite length.
(We add for Saganesque rhetorical vivacity that this includes infinitely many
sentences, α, of such length that a 10-point inscription of α would require all of
the matter of billions and billions of universes.)
Compositionality does not in the ordinary way explain the features of a formal
language. Such a language is a mathematical object, as are its sentences. Beyond
the demands of paedagogy, explanation is simply otiose. The features are rather
the demonstrable consequences of an inductive definition. The vocabulary of
compositionality plays no role in that definition, but only in the general
characterization of the set of sentences. Moreover, as we have seen, if we are to
understand the word as a cognate of compose, then the claim of compositionality
can at best be understood as a claim of representability. And, considerations of
otiosity aside, there is a general question whether representability, independently
of substantive hypothesis, can ever play any genuine explanatory role, let alone in
such a case as this, where the hypothesis is false.
What lesson can we draw about compositionality as applied to natural language?
In the first place, the questions that arise about formal languages arise less
tractably about natural languages. As we have remarked, no one has yet proposed
an inductive definition of the sentences of a natural language; there is no welldefined natural-language notion of form; the set of atomic constituents is not
fixed; moreover, conversational competence sets variable upper limits on sentence
length. To be sure, we do in fact produce and understand an indefinitely large
variety of productions, but this is an empirical fact requiring explanation: it is not
merely a demonstrable consequence of a recursive definition.
In the matter of variety, there may be some understanding of linguistic
competence by which we would be able to produce sentences of great length. A
novelist could let it be known that the punctuation mark understood elsewhere as
indicating the end of a sentence, in his work was to be understood as a
conjunctive connective. (A desperate degree candidate might prefer to have his
full stops understood as disjunction.) But though we possess the competence that
consists in our knowing how to set about doing such a thing, we also possess the
countervailing conversational competence that consists in our knowing better than
to do so. If a grammar insists that some modally defined subset of the sentences
of, say, English is “theoretically” closed under infixing or, or and, or under
conditionalization, so much for theoretical grammar; a paedagogical grammar
would tell us to give our interlocutor a break. Actual language production already
gives ample evidence of unlimited novelty without unlimited length. This is the
puzzle.
Compositionality is what makes formal languages formal. In such a language we
can identify the form of a sentence with the set of its substitution instances, that
is, with the closure of its unit set under uniform substitution. For a natural
19
language, any correspondingly substitutional notion of form must be enormously
complicated and therefore closely circumscribed. In the first place, atomicity is
nowhere defined. Where the term is used in relation to natural languages, atoms
tend to be identified as constructions that are not themselves ‘semantically
compositional’. Moreover, even if we identify the form of a sentence with the set
of outcomes of grammatically typed substitutions, there must be a large residuum
of substitutional constraints that are not purely syntactic and sometimes ultimately
semantic in character. For example, in the sentence You do this or you do that,
substitutions of the verb-phrase drink coffee for do this, and drink tea for do that
preserves disjunctivity, but from the substitution-instance You may drink coffee or
you may drink tea, as we have noted, we correctly infer that we may drink coffee,
so disjunctivity is lost. And when a philosopher gives an account of what is called
‘the logical form’ of such a sentence, he typically consults such considerations as
what can be correctly inferred from it. Thus (assuming that he notices the
peculiarity) a reflective philosopher will say that the sentence resulting from the
second substitution must be represented as a conjunction. So the closest
approximation to uniform substitution in the natural-language setting does not
preserve form. On the usual notion of natural language form, content affects form.
But prosody affects form as well. For example, we can prosodically vary our
production of the sentence If he won the lottery he’d be gloomy in such ways as to
make it correct to report what we said as Winning the lottery would make him
gloomy, or alternatively in such a way as to justify the reported claim as that of
Winning the lottery would not relieve his gloom.
Because compositionally defined, the set of sentences of a formal language is
fixed. By contrast, conversational composition is the principal engine of naturallanguage change. First, individual components of speech are not grammatically
fixed. As Servius observed in the fourth century, nouns acquire adjectival uses
(hockey ▻25 hockey fan), adjectives adverbial ones (very God ▻ very silly),
adverbs adsentential ones (How? She was typically dressed ▻ How often?
Typically she was dressed), adsentences epiphrastic uses (Therefore I went
wingeing to the dean ▻ Therefore, you see, I did take bold action). Prepositions
yield subordinators (No one but the landlord… ▻ …A month doesn’t go by but
the landlord raises the rent); subordinators yield sentential connectives (It doesn’t
rain but it pours ▻ It doesn’t rain, but it does snow a lot). Some such
transcategorial innovations come about by speech productions through active
exaptations of elements of previous speech productions; some by the transmission
of undetected misapprehensions. Engendering does not preserve grammatical
category.
A corollary is that engendering does not preserve the apprehension of crudity or
awkwardness or inaptness of construction. We find nothing odd about the use of
have as a past-tense auxiliary or of going as a future-tense auxiliary, though we
might doubt whether no one ever did. No native speaker finds crudity in the
25
Eventuates.
20
almost Anaxagorean construction to have to do with as applied to topics of
conversation (What does history have to do with meaning?) nor in the use of keep
in keep going, or get in get going. Those for whom didn’t use to has replaced used
not to do not perceive the crudity perceived by those who retain the older form.
Likewise adverbial uses of good and real do not seem crude to those who have
forsaken well and really. But even such innovators would perhaps perceive as
crude the construction didn’t ought to have, which for some has replaced ought
not to have.
A second corollary is that engendering does not preserve incidence of effect. The
facts of functionalization sufficiently illustrate its failure on this score.
Functionalization raises to salience effects that were merely incidental to
prefunctionalized lexical uses. The auxiliary going, perhaps even going to, as in
I’m going to stay where I am, brings into salience the imminence of a
circumstance, which was merely incidental to motion toward. Likewise the
auxiliary, have as in I’ve been there; I’ve done that, brings to the fore a cessation
of lack, which was merely incidental to possession. Likewise, in functionalized
get and keep attainment and sustainment displace acquisition (attainment of
ownership) and retention (sustainment of ownership). In this respect,
conversational innovation resembles technological advance. The incidental
characteristics of one instrument are exploited as the specialization of a later one.
In general, however, no hypothesis of purposive change is warranted. Use
naturally varies environment, howsoever minutely. Eventually, environments are
encountered that sustain some effects better than others, and new uses are
speciated.
A more general corollary is that engendering does not preserve lexical saturation.
Verbs and verb phrases eventually appear in environments that, roughly speaking,
occasion a diminished set of inferences. For example get away with acquires uses
that prompt no inference of attained physical separation, only of unforestalled
accomplishment.
More fundamentally, this kind of exaptative innovation is applied in speech even
to what pass for atoms (on the usual understanding, semantically noncompositional items) in natural language. But then even the set of naturallanguage atoms is by no means fixed. As in the kinds of transcategorial
innovations previously listed, the resources of productions are the resources
bestowed by previous productions. The effects of new productions are engendered
and underwritten by the effects of former productions. Non-compositionality
notwithstanding, atomic innovations can be adaptations of previous atoms and the
effects of such adaptations reliably anticipated. So, for example, if the effects in
conversation of Now you’re cooking with gas are understood, then so will be the
effects of Now you’re cooking with camel dung. It was because of the pre-existing
uses of diamond in the rough that Dorothy Parker could sufficiently anticipate the
effect of rhinestone in the rough.
21
On that understanding of atom, engendering does not preserve the set of atoms of
natural language. Old ones pass into disuse and new ones are introduced.
Representability
We earlier expressed a general doubt whether representability, independently of
substantive hypothesis, can ever play any genuine explanatory role. We raise the
question here. Consider, as an example, the English word or. We are assured by
Grice that we need postulate no “senses” for or other than the one dictated by the
1110 definition of propositional ∨. But Grice did not consider such uses of or as
that of
You may have tea or you may have coffee
which seems on the face of it to be conjunctive, since we correctly infer that we
may have tea (coffee) and moreover, adsentential like that of alternatively. Nor
did Grice consider such apparently adsentential uses as that of
I must get going now or I will be late
where the or seems replaceable by the adsentence otherwise, and the sentence by
no means equivalent to
If I needn’t get going now, then I will be late.
Now there is a common response to such examples along the following lines. In
the former sentence there is an implicit universal quantifier. It can be represented
using 1110 disjunction by
(x)(Tx ∨ Cx → P(Hmx)).
In understanding the latter, one must recognize the modal auxiliary must, by some
modal connective having long scope
□(Gm ∨ Lm).
It will be argued that if we doubt whether such uses of or can be represented by
∨, then we must entertain similar doubts about the representation of
If you speak Urdu or Hindi, you can make yourself useful
and
I don’t speak Urdu or Hindi,
22
which also yield conjunctions. But the biologer of language might have no
relevant doubts about any of these representations as useful approximations for
purposes of, say, computer applications. He might nevertheless fail to see the fact
of representability as explaining the uses of or in English. Indeed it does not do so
independently of some such contention as that the brain’s responses to these
occurrences somehow depends upon the representability, or that the
representability somehow causally accounts for the presence in the language of
these uses. That the mere fact of representability cannot serve either role is
evident from the fact already noted: every sentence propositionally representable
is equivalently representable by either a disjunctive or a conjunctive normal form.
One’s choice of DNF or CNF tells us nothing about the natural role of and or or
in any natural language. Even within a formal language, form is not a matter of
representability. Were it otherwise, every sentence, including atoms, would have
infinitely many forms.
Recursive Embedding
Now, certain of our conversational capacities can be represented by reference to
recursion. Here is an example. We can say
I dislike hockey
and one’s dislike can be extended to people who do like hockey. Thus, one can
say
I dislike hockey fans.
Moreover, on the principle that friends of our enemies are our enemies, one can
say
I dislike hockey fan fans
by embedding a nominal adjective fan in the noun-phrase hockey fans. What is
required to represent this? a function that takes as its inputs (a) a noun-phrase
hockey fann fans and (b) the noun fan. By a null transformation the noun fan
becomes the adjective fan, and outputs the noun-phrase hockey fann+1 fans. It is
true of course that in the ordinary way we do not produce utterances that iterate
the embedding even as many as, say, six times, and that if we did, our audience
would lose track after three or so, but on any formal representation of our
competence we have the capacity for any finite iteration of the trick. But trick it
is. The first embedding (in the third sentence) exploits the adjectifying device of
the second sentence. It demonstrates the capacity of its producer to exploit
existing linguistic resources (in accordance with a standard practice) to produce
conversational novelty. It by no means requires an adjectifying operation, if we
admit a tolerance for crudity in linguistic innovation. A second embedding
demonstrates a formally similar capacity, but the novelty is derivative. Recall
23
John Austin’s oenologue, roughly: “There are burgundy wines and burgundy-type
wines. This, I should say, is a burgundy-type-type wine.” Of course, a dull fellow
might add with a chuckle and little wit “…or a burgundy-type-type-type wine”,
but his achievement would be inglorious: a moral rehearsal for plagiarism.
Engendering preserves neither originality nor demonstrated wit.
In general, natural language provides a larger epigenetic evolutionary scale, a
scale that relieves us of the need for hypotheses that locate the capacity for such
embeddings in individual human brains. Indeed, if our earlier observations can be
applied here, we can say no more than that the acquisition of the capacity for
iterated centre embeddings of dependent clauses is the accomplishment of a
population, and only derivatively an acquisition by its members. Taking this view
we can assume at most that such iterative embeddings in the spoken production of
a sentence are descended from ancestral non-iterative embeddings (whether of
clauses or not) of ancestral productions (whether sentences or not).
On such a hypothesis, the question as to how such embeddings have become
available is empirical. As a preliminary to an investigation, we must ask ourselves
what kind of physical phenomenon we are trying to explain. Why? Because a
biological account reasonably regards a present device as a specialization of an
earlier one. The aetiology of the refinement extends the aetiology of its less
refined antecedent. So it becomes relevant to notice that what is achieved
efficiently in speech by an embedding of dependent clauses could be achieved
less efficiently by a sequence of nested interruptions. The point applies both to
restrictive and to non-restrictive clauses, to exegetic appositions, to visual reports
as well as to fictional narrative. It applies to conversation
A: Senator Vandalprone...
B: Who after all does pay our salaries...
C: Pittance though it might be...
A: has asked whether we might put...
C: The boots in...
A: ...up some foreign...
B: Agents...
A: guests for the weekend.
as well as to responsive monologue
That girl over there
Not that one, more to the left
the one with the dog
the yellow dog
the one with a neckerchief
She’s a terrible cutie
(As Yeats would say)
The girl, I mean, not the dog.
Anyway, I saw her with bloody what’s-his-face again last night.
24
The rebarbative David, I mean. Disgusting!
Marc, Norman’s son, not Aunt Kathleen’s husband, has entered a
contest; Kreft Vulcanized Dairy Products is sponsoring it.
This is the first observation. Speech and, derivatively, inscription are temporally
extended interventions that we or our interlocutors can digressively interrupt.
Even single polysyllabic words can have other words tmetically (“t-ruddymetically”) interpolated (But that would mean a whole nother year.) In the case of
sentences, interruptions can themselves be interrupted. How might present centreembedding capacities have evolved from a more primitive capacity to nest
interruptions? There may be no single answer. If the capacity is an epigenetic one,
distinct languages might require accounts that differ in the measure of their
phylogenetic separation. Even for English we can forward only observations and
questions about resources and engendering.
A second observation is that the subordinators that, who, which and so on also
have longstanding pronominal uses as,
Who so beset him round with dismal stories
Do but themselves confound…
and
Who dares wins.
So there need be no explicit non-null subordinating operation involving pronoun
replacement, only an initial, but unpreserved apprehension of crudity.
A third observation is that not all imbedded clauses are restrictive clauses. Since
some such clauses are non-restrictive, biologically relevant questions emerge. Is
the distinction classical? To see the difficulty, consider Milton’s famous example.
Him the Almighty Power
Hurld headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Skie
With hideous ruine and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,
Who durst defie th' Omnipotent to Arms.
Inscriptionally distinguishable examples are less evidently distinguishable in
spoken English. Contrast
This is a story set in 1880 about Winston Churchill, the child who would become
First Sea Lord
25
with
This is a story set in 1880 about Winston Churchill the child, who would become
First Sea Lord.
If in speech, the distinction is near the limits of prosodic marking, then
engendering would not reliably preserve whichever came first. But which sort did
come first? This an empirical question to be settled, if it can be, by historical
investigation. However, on the principle that, as regards clausal structure, the
relatively simple likely preceded the relatively complex, one might reasonably
hypothesize that non-restrictive clauses are the more primitive. And this
supposition invites a final pair of questions: (1) under what conditions would
engendering fail to preserve non-restrictivity of clauses? (2) how probable are
such conditions?
A speaker’s non-restrictive clause can incidentally individuate for some hearers.
In a Welsh village, an outsider’s construction
Jones, who, incidentally, had donated the food, stayed on at the meeting to lead
the singing.
may, for particular hearers, serve to pick out Jones Provisioner as distinct from
Jones Postmaster, Jones Undertaker, Jones Estate Agent, Jones Constable and so
on, all members of the chapel choir. Once it is admitted that attribution can
incidentally fix reference, the epigenetic case is made, for engendering does not
preserve incidence. Incidental effects of earlier acts of speech are available for
exploitation in later acts of speech. Restrictive clauses can emerge from nonrestrictive clauses that happen to disambiguate reference. As to the probability of
such instances, it need not be very high, since such a development can be
propagated from isolated instances. Nor need we suppose that the distinction
between non-restrictive and restrictive clauses, just because we now readily make
it, became immediately a matter of deliberable alternatives in speech production
or a matter of discriminable alternatives in speech apprehension. Again, the
standards of speaker-hearer agreement are just the standards required for the
transmission of linguistic practice from one generation to the next at the
prevailing rate of change. There is no reason to suppose that these standards are
exacting. We have adduced examples that suggest otherwise.
Now to say that the case is made is not to say that the case is won, merely that
there is an epigenetic case to be met. But the general principle applies here as
elsewhere: we need assume only such a degree of genetic control as is required
for linguistic transmission at the prevailing rate of change.
Biological syntax
26
As to whether the syntax of articulate motion, walking, running, pounding,
throwing, speech production, and so on is hierarchical on some theoretically
useful understanding of syntax and hierarchy, we prefer no judgement. But much
the same general remarks presumably apply to the relative importance of genetic
and epigenetic developments for an understanding of articulation as apply in the
questions of linguistic syntax. On a larger evolutionary scale, the accession to the
fine discriminations required for accurate ballistic motion and to those of
participation in conversation are more likely the outcome of a process of release
from purely genetic control than not. They seem to have included the freeing of
ancestral forelimbs from the requirements of locomotion, the freeing of the
ancestral prognathous jaw from the requirements of crushing, and so on. Of
course this is not to say that there is no genetically underwritten component of an
individual’s potential for conversational participation, including participation in
successive embeddings. It is however to say that a capacity for participation is not
a capacity for recursion: only a capacity for iteration.
This being so, the only indisputably genetically underwritten syntax is that of
articulate motion in general, and of speech-specific articulation in particular. That
is to say, we have the capacity to utter and within utterances to embed utterances,
and utterances within embedded utterances. As a practical matter, the depths of
such embeddings that we ever actually produce in conversation are restricted by
the respiratory cycle, the digestive cycle, the limitations of working memory, the
sleep cycle, the need for nourishment and drink, the need of exercise and
grooming, considerations of mental hygiene, imperatives of reproduction,
seasonal adjustments of dress, and eventually death. Evidently, any such
articulative capacity as is revealed in actual conversation is a neural capacity,
since all of the component physiological requirements are themselves infused
with neural ones. In all of this the brain plays a selective role, as well as a
coordinative one that permits and accommodates embeddings both anticipated
and unanticipated.
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