WSU Humanities Center, 9/17/13
Ljiljana Progovac
progovac@wayne.edu
Acknowledgements
For travel support, I am grateful for the WSU Distinguished Faculty Award and the
Humanities Center Grant for Innovative Projects. For many good comments and
discussions, my sincere thanks go to Martha Ratliff, Eugenia Casielles, John L. Locke,
Paweł Rutkowski, David Gil, Jasmina Milićević, Draga Zec, Relja Vulanović, Tecumseh
Fitch, Ana Progovac, Natasha Kondrashova, Steven Franks, Fritz Newmeyer, Andrea
Moro, Noa Ofen, Ray Jackendoff, Željko Bošković, Ellen Barton, Kate Paesani, Pat Siple,
Walter Edwards, Dan Seeley, Stephanie Harves, Igor Yanovich, Dan Everett, Andrew
Nevins, Juan Uriagereka, Rafaella Zanuttini, Stephanie Harves, Richard Kayne, Brady
Clark, Jim Hurford, Robert Henderson, Geoff Nathan, Margaret Winters, Daniel Ross,
Pat Schneider-Zioga, as well as many (other) audiences at SLS (2006), MLS (2006, 2007),
GURT (2007), ILA in New York (2007), the Max Planck Workshop on Complexity in
Leipzig, Germany (2007), the ISU Conference on Recursion (2007), FASL (2007, 2008,
2012), AATSEEL (2007), the DGfS Workshop on Language Universals in Bamberg,
Germany (2008), EvoLang, Barcelona (2008), BALE in York, England (2008), Novi Sad,
Serbia (2008), Torún, Poland (2009), EvoLang, Utrecht, Netherlands (2010), University of
Virginia, Charlottesville (2012), University of Washington, Seattle (2012), University of
Western Ontario (2012), Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (2013). All errors are mine.
2
How did syntax evolve?
 Could it be via one single, minor mutation?
 Berwick (1998) “There is no possibility of an ‘intermediate’
syntax between a non-combinatorial one and full natural
language—one either has Merge in all its generative glory, or one
has no combinatorial syntax at all ...”
 Berwick and Chomsky (2011) “the simplest assumption, hence
the one we adopt…, is that the generative procedure emerged
suddenly as the result of a minor mutation. Language is
something like a snowflake, assuming its particular form by
virtue of laws of nature… Optimally, recursion can be reduced to
Merge… There is no room in this picture for any precursors to
language—say a language-like system with only short sentences.
The same holds for language acquisition, despite appearances…”
 see also Bickerton’s (1998) “catastrophic evolution”
3
Gradualist stance
 Pinker and Bloom (1990): natural selection of complex
systems
 Jackendoff (e.g. 1999, 2002): “living fossils”
 Progovac (e.g. 2008; 2009a,b): using the theory of syntax
(Minimalism) to reconstruct stages of proto-grammar;
reinforcing internal reconstruction with “living fossils”
found in various modern languages
(see also Heine and Kuteva (2007) for reconstruction based on
the theory of grammaticalization)
 corroborating evidence and testing grounds: language
acquisition (spoken and signed), aphasia, language
disorders, genetics, neuroscience
4
Living fossils
 Jackendoff (2002): not only are previous stages present
in the brain, but also ‘their “fossils” are present in
the grammar of modern language itself
 Progovac (2008, 2009a,b): not only is fossil syntax still
in use in certain modern language constructions, but
this fossil syntax is built into the very foundation
of more complex structures, providing evidence for
evolutionary tinkering with the language design
5
Gradualist approach is feasible
 Pinker and Bloom (1990) assume the Baldwin Effect, the process




whereby environmentally-induced responses set up selection
pressures for such responses to become innate, triggering
conventional Darwinian evolution.
Tiny selective advantages are sufficient for evolutionary change: a
variant that produces on average 1% more offspring than its
alternative allele would increase in frequency from 0.1% to 99.9%
of the population in just over 4,000 generations.
This would still leave plenty of time for language to have evolved:
3.5-5 million years, if early Australopithecines were the first
talkers, or, as an absolute minimum, several hundred thousand
years, in the unlikely event that early Homo Sapiens was the first.
Fixations of different genes can go in parallel.
Sexual selection can significantly speed up the process.
6
In search for grammars producing
short (and flat) sentences
A host of constructions across languages point to such grammars
 So-called “small clauses” are used abundantly in adult languages
(theoretically recognized concept)
 Children language acquisition proceeds through a two-word (arguably
small clause) stage
 Verb-noun and other compounds (two-word molds)
 Intransitive absolutive-like structures (only one argument; no
subject-object distinction)
 Unaccusatives (only one argument; subject-object distinction
blurred)
 Middles (straddling the boundary btw. intransitivity and
transitivity; passive and active; subjecthood and objecthood)
 Paratactic attachment of small clauses is binary (slides 22-24)
 Merge (of Minimalism) is binary: can only combine two elements at a
time
7
Two-word intransitive stage
 Proposal: a two-word paratactic intransitive stage predated
more complex syntax
 A two-word stage cannot accommodate both subjects and
objects (with verbs); it must have been intransitive and
absolutive-like, in the sense that no subject-object
distinction was syntactically encoded
 Kegl et al. (1999), the earliest (pidgin) stages of Nicaraguan
Sign Language do not use transitive NP V NP constructions,
such as *WOMAN PUSH MAN. Instead, they use two
paratactically combined (intransitive) clauses, an NP V — NP V
sequence:
(i) WOMAN PUSH — MAN REACT.
(ii) WOMAN PUSH — MAN FALL.
The only argument here is absolutive-like in the sense above
8
Homesign – absolutive-like?
 Goldin-Meadow (2005)
 The syntax of Homesign languages also seems
absolutive-like: both patients/themes and intransitive
agents tend to precede verbs, once again, neutralizing
the distinction between subjects and objects
 There is typically only one argument per verb
 Both American and Chinese deaf children are more
likely to produce the sign for the eaten than for the
eater (real agents/subjects typically suppressed); this is
also the case with fossils compounds, nominals, etc.
9
Ergative/absolutive patterns
 In some ergative languages (e.g. Tongan, Austronesian
language), the subject of the intransitive clause is not
distinguishable from the object, both appearing in the socalled absolutive case (Tchekhoff 1979, 409):
(i) ‘oku
kai
‘ae
iká.
PRES
eat
the
fish
‘The fish eats.’ Or: ‘The fish is eaten.’
 The subject of a transitive verb carries ergative marking
(next slide), but the other two roles are collapsed into one,
absolutive role
 Some analyze ergative arguments as optional adjuncts (e.g.
Nash 1006; Alexiadou 2001)
10
Ergative added to absolutive base
 This intransitive absolutive layer provides foundation upon which one
can add an ergative agent (one type of transition to transitivity):
(i) Oku
ui
‘a Mele
(Tchekhoff 1973, 283)
PRES call
Mary
‘Mary calls.’ Or: ‘Mary is called.’
(ii) Oku
ui
‘e Sione‘
a Mele
PRES call
by-John
Mary
‘John calls Mary.’
 Similar ergative-like patterns found in nominals (noun phrases) across
(non-ergative) languages (e.g. Alexiadou 2001)
(iii) John’s portrayal (by the media/of the media) was unfair
(iv) John’s painting/portrait (by the artist)
(v) John’s observation took 2 hours.
(optional by-phrase likened to the ergative case, e.g. Comrie 1978)
11
Proposal: Absolutives as precursors
to transitivity
 Specific proposal: Intransitive absolutive-like




grammars predated transitivity in language evolution
Such grammars involved a predicate and only one
argument (two-word grammar)
There was no distinction between subjects and objects
Such absolutive-like patterns are available in various
guises in all modern-day languages (fossils)
They also serve as foundation for constructing
more complex (transitive) structures
12
Compound fossils: Today’s morphology
is yesterday’s syntax (Givón)
 Verb-Noun compounds are absolutive-like fossils: they fit
into a two-slot syntactic frame (Progovac 2012)
 scare-crow, kill-joy, pick-pocket, cry-baby, cut-purse, busybody, spoil-sport, turn-coat, rattle-snake, hunch-back,
dare-devil, wag-tail, tattle-tale, saw-bones, cut-throat,
Burn-house, Love-joy, Pinch-penny (miser), sink-hole
 Typically, the noun is object-like, but can also be subjectlike, as in the underlined compounds
 No differentiation between subjects and objects; as with
Homesign, preference for expressing the eaten, rather than
the eater (Slide 9); see also nominals (Slide 11)
13
VN compounds across languages
and times
 The same holds for Serbian and other languages
 ispi-čutura (drink.up-flask—drunkard), guli-koža
(peel-skin—who rips you off), cepi-dlaka (split-hair—
who splits hairs), muti-voda (muddy-water—troublemaker), jebi-vetar (screw-wind—charlatan), vrti-guz
(spin-butt—fidget); tuži-baba (whine-old.woman;
tattletale); pali-drvce (ignite-stick, matches)
 These compounds are now fossils in most languages,
but they used to be productive and numbered in the
thousands, e.g. in the medieval times
14
Compounding the Insult
 These VN compounds specialize for derogatory reference
when referring to humans
 They provide evidence of ritual insult, and are thus of
potential sexual selection significance (Progovac and Locke
2009)
 You can create many stunning insults with two-word
grammars, not possible by using single words; also, you can
create abstract vocabulary out of concrete concepts
 The vast majority of these compounds have not been
preserved in dictionaries or grammar books, due to their
“unquotable coarseness”
15
Syntactic reconstruction:
Unraveling the syntactic layering
 Minimalism (e.g. Chomsky 1995): to derive a transitive
sentence (i), the internal (object-like) argument starts
in the VP (or Small Clause (SC)) (ii a), and the external
argument (e.g. agent) in the outer vP shell (iib):
(i) Maria will roll the ball.
(ii) a.[SC/VP roll the ball] →
b.[vP Maria [SC/VP roll the ball]] →
 Then Tense Phrase (TP) projects on top, and attracts the
highest argument to become its subject (iic)
c.[TP: Maria will [vP Maria [SC/VP roll the ball]]]
16
Every sentence starts as a small clause
 Modern syntactic theory (e.g. Minimalism and
predecessors) analyzes every clause/sentence as
initially a small clause (SC) (e.g. Stowell 1981, 1983;
Burzio 1981; Kitagawa 1986; Koopman & Sportiche 1991;
Chomsky 1995, and subsequent work)
 This is one of the most stable postulates of syntactic theory
 The TP layer is superimposed upon the layer of SC, as
if the building of the modern sentence retraces its
evolutionary steps
17
Syntax without vP: Unaccusatives (and
absolutives)
 But it is possible to have syntax without a vP layer;
according to e.g. Chomsky (1995) and Kratzer (2000),
unaccusatives do not have a vP layer, i.e. transitivity layer:
(i) The ball will roll/fall.
(ii) a.[SC/VP roll/fall the ball]]
b.[TP: The ball will [SC/VP roll/fall the ball]]
Unaccusatives analyzed as Merging their “subject” in the
object position (e.g. Burzio 1981; Perlmutter 1978)
 The highest argument moves to TP to become “subject”
 Notice how the SC/VP (absolutive layer) serves as
foundation for transitive vP shells (Slide 16)
18
But you can remove the TP layer, too:
Bare small clauses
 With unaccusative small clauses in Serbian, only one layer of
structure is there, the [SC/VP] layer (e.g. Progovac 2008); the
“subject” stays put, as there is no TP:
(i) [SC/VP
Pala
vlada.]
fall. PART
government
‘The government collapsed.’
(“PART” stands for a participle form of the verb)
 Contrast full TPs: “Vlada je pala.” (same meaning as above)
(ii) a. Small clause: [SC/VP pala vlada] 
b. [TP je [SC pala vlada]]
c. TP [TP vlada [T’ je [SC pala vlada]]]
 Notice: SC/VP provides a foundation for building TP
 Both clause types are in productive use in Serbian
19
Gradual progression
 Gradual progression through 3 rough syntactic stages
towards increased syntactic complexity:
 from one single layer of structure in TP-less, vP-less small
clauses (absolutive-like stage) (Slide 19)
 to 2 layers of structure in TP unaccusatives (Slide 18)
 to 3 layers of structure with TP transitives (Slide 16)
 Each new layer brings a clear and concrete advantage,
which could have been targeted by natural/sexual selection
(see below)
 There are even intermediate steps leading from
intransitives to vP transitives, so-called “middles” (slides
29-33)
20
Reconstruction based on syntax
 Proposed internal reconstruction is based on the theory of
syntax (Minimalism, e.g. Chomsky 1995):
 A structure X is considered to be (evolutionary) primary
relative to a structure Y if X can be composed
independently of Y, but Y can only be built upon the
foundation of X
 While small clauses/VPs can be composed without the vP
or TP layers, vPs and TPs need to be built upon the
foundation of a small clause/VP
 this hierarchy of functional projections (e.g. Abney 1987) is a
theoretical construct, with good empirical foundation
21
Converging with Heine and Kuteva (2007)
 This reconstruction, based on the theory of syntax,
converges with that of Heine and Kuteva (2007), which
is based on grammaticalization processes
 Grammaticalization almost always creates a
functional category out of a lexical category, and
almost never the other way around
 Conclusion: functional categories emerged gradually
at a later stage of language evolution
 There could have existed a stage with only nouns and
verbs (enabling two-word grammars)
22
Are “living fossils” really that much
simpler?
 Living fossils of the simplest proto-syntax are rigid, non-moving,
non-recursive structures:
 Cannot embed (no recursion):
(i)
a. *Ja
mislim [(da)
pala
vlada].
I
think (that)
fell
government
b. Contrast full TP: Ja mislim [da je pala vlada].
 The same holds for the comparable fossils in English:
(ii) Problem solved.
*I think that [problem solved.]
*I consider [problem solved.]
You can be cognitively fully capable of recursion, but if your syntax
lacks the appropriate functional categories and structures, you cannot
express it.
23
Merge is not all you need
 No Move either:
(i) a.
*Kada pala vlada?
when fell government
b.
Contrast: Kada je pala vlada?
(ii) a.
*When/*How problem solved?
b.
When/How was the problem solved?
 Move and Recursion are not an automatic
consequence of Merge (as claimed in e.g. Fitch, Hauser &
Chomsky 2005); instead, one also needs functional
categories and layered/hierarchical syntax
24
More English fossils
(i) a. Case closed. Crisis averted. Point taken.
Mission accomplished. Lesson learned.
b. Me first! Family first! Everybody out!
 Small clause flat grammars allow only paratactic/
symmetric clause unions
(ii) Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Easy come, easy go.
Monkey see, monkey do.
Come one, come all.
No money, no come. (e.g. pidgin languages)
25
Similar fossils across languages
Twi (spoken in Ghana); Kingsley Okai (p.c.)
(i) Wo
dua, wo
twa
you sow you reap
(ii) Wo
hwehwea,
wo
hu
you seek
you find
Serbian
(iii) Preko preče, naokolo bliže.
‘Across shorter, around closer.’
(iv) Koliko para, toliko i muzike.
how-much money, that-much music
26
More binary data
 Latin:
(1)
a. Bene diagnoscitur, bene curatur
well diagnosed, well cured
b. Cito maturum, cito putridum
early ripe, early rotten
Even deep wisdoms can be expressed, and often are, with the simplest of
grammars
 True living fossils: Such binary combinations are productive in some
languages, e.g. Hmong (Martha Ratliff, p.c.)
(2) a. ua
noj
ua
haus
make eat
make drink
'to earn a living’
b. kav
teb
kav
chaw
rule
land
rule
place
'to rule a county'
Unaccusative small clauses in Serbian are also living fossils
27
Only binary unions
 But notice that these paratactic (symmetric/non-
hierarchical) unions are almost always binary (twoslot grammars)
(i) No shoes, no shirt, no service (exception)
(ii) ??Nothing ventured, nothing gained, nothing lost.
 Our brains are at a loss as to how to process e.g. (ii)
 Binary Merge in syntax may have its roots in this
processing limitation: Merge can only combine 2
elements at a time
28
Evidence for an absolutive-like
intransitive stage
 Recall:
 Absolutive-like fossils found in all languages, including
nominative-accusative (e.g. compounds; nominals); provide
common ground for all language types
 Crosslinguistic variation reflects different paths taken from
there (ergative-absolutive vs. nominative-accusative types)
 Nicaraguan Sign Language and Homesign
 Further evidence:
 Middles: transitional structures, straddling the boundary
between intransitivity and transitivity
 Language acquisition
 Potential testing grounds: neuroimaging
29
The “middle” ground
 According to e.g. Kemmer (1994, 181), “the reflexive
and the middle [are] … semantic categories
intermediate in transitivity between one-participant
and two-participant events.”
 There is an amazing array of such ambivalent,
transitional structures across various languages,
blurring the distinctions between subjects and objects,
passives and actives, transitivity and intransitivity
 Exactly what one expects under a gradualist
approach to the evolution of syntax; puzzling
otherwise
30
Unbearable vagueness of meaning
 Middle se in e.g. Serbian exhibits astounding vagueness,
reflexivity being only one of the available interpretations:
(i) Deca
se
tuku.
children
hit
SE
‘The children are hitting each other/themselves.’
‘The children are hitting somebody else.’
‘One hits/spanks children.’
(ii) Marko se udara!
Marko SE hits
‘Marko is hitting me.’ [most salient discourse participant]
‘Marko is hitting somebody.’
‘Marko is hitting himself.’
31
Se in Spanish
 Comparable vagueness also found with se constructions in
Spanish (Arce-Arenales, Axelrod, and Fox 1994, 5):
(i) Juan se
mató.
Juan SE
killed
‘Juan got killed.’
‘Juan killed himself.’
 See also English passive-like structure:
(ii) The children got dressed.
 This vagueness is reminiscent of absolutives in Tongan
(slide 9)
32
Se as a proto-transitive marker
 This is essentially the vague absolutive-like pattern, to
which se is added, analyzed here as a proto-transitive
marker (Progovac, to appear)
 Se just indicates that there is one more participant
involved in the event, but the rest is left to context
 Se also occurs with dative subjects in Serbian, another
fossil with a hint of ergativity
 In syntax, se has been analyzed as an expletive
(meaningless) pronoun in the object position (e.g.
Franks 1995; Progovac 2005).
33
Many other hints of ergativity in
nominative-accusative languages
 DuBois (1987) has noted that the kind of pattern in
which the eaten is expressed more readily than the
eater, is common in the languages of the world:
(i) a. John grew tomatoes. b. John grew.
(ii) a. John shook Bill.
b. John shook.
 Fluidity of the concept “subject”
34
Interim summary
 Method: internal reconstruction of syntax based on the
theory of syntax (Minimalism), coupled with the search for
fossils
 The initial stage of syntax -- protosyntax:
 Two-word grammars (e.g. predicate + one argument)
 Intransitive and absolutive-like
 No distinction between subjects and objects
 No syntactic layering (no vP or TP); flat structure
 No move or recursion
 A host of fossils in modern languages still show (at least
some) of these properties: VN compounds, absolutives,
unaccusatives; nominals, dative subjects
35
Summary cont.
 Supporting evidence:
 “Living fossils” used alongside more complex constructions
 Fossils are built into the very foundation of complex
structures; e.g. an intransitive small clause (VP) is built into
transitive vP shells, as well as into TPs
 This kind of tinkering is expected under a gradualist
approach to the evolution of syntax, but is puzzling
otherwise
 Corroborating evidence and testing grounds: language
acquisition (spoken and signed), aphasia, language
disorders, language representation in the brain
36
Analogy with the development of the
heart
 My analysis of small clauses intergrading into full
sentences/TPs resembles the development of the
human heart (Garrett Mitchener, p.c.)
 The embryo initially has only a simple, primitive
precursor to the heart, consisting only of two simple
tubes, which merge, but even such primitive heart can
perform the necessary rudimentary function
 The precursor gradually bulges and expands into a
complex heart in the course of fetal development
37
Are reversals and losses possible?
 Dawkins: body hair can recede and reappear a number of
times in the history of a species
 Some recent genetic studies reveal that reversals and losses
are possible even in the evolution of multi-cellularity, a
major transition in the history of life. Schirrmeister,
Antonelli, and Bagheri (2011) report that the majority of
extant cyanobacteria, one of the oldest phyla still alive,
including many single-celled species, descend from
multi-cellular ancestors, and that reversals to
unicellularity occurred at least five times.
 Languages can also sometimes “undress” (McWhorter 2011)
38
Child syntax – absolutive-like?
 Two-word stage in L-1 acquisition (e.g. Bloom 1970)
 Children are claimed to “delete” arguments in their
speech
 Zheng and Goldin-Meadow (2002): such “deletions”
follow an ergative/absolutive pattern
 Children omit transitive subjects and produce
intransitive subjects and objects (absolutive-like
grammar); see Homesign and compounds (slides 9, 13)
 Zheng and Goldin-Meadow (2002): the ergative/
absolutive pattern is more robust; characterizes the
speech of both hearing children and deaf children
39
Can syntax be adaptive?
 Only if you can decompose it into appropriate stages
 E.g. the capability to create 2-word insults (compounds)




increases fitness (Progovac & Locke 2009); sexual selection
vP introduces transitivity and with it more precision/less
vagueness; can grammatically distinguish subjects from objects
TP: break away from the prison of the here-and-now, and from
the prison of pragmatics in general
Displacement only possible with complex/hierarchical grammars
Nested recursion (e.g. embedding one viewpoint within another)
only possible with complex/hierarchical grammars (e.g. “John
believes that Peter knows that Mary left town.” vs. “John believes
that. Peter knows that. Mary left town.”)
40
Displacement and vP-less grammars
 Displacement (also recursion) is one of the design features




of human language (Hocket 1960)
One word (pre-syntactic) stage:
(i) Apple. Eat. John.
Two-word (absolutive-like) stage:
(ii) Apple eat. John go.
Hierarchical TP/vP stage:
(iii) John will eat the apple.
(iv) The apple will eat John.
Only elaborated grammars allow the depiction of nonpresent, strange, or non-existent situations, because they
can escape the prison of context (imagination, innovation)
41
Displacement and TP-less
grammars
 TP-less small clauses typically rooted in the here and now:
(i) Problem solved (*three years ago).
(ii) Me first (*three years ago).
 Full TPs can escape into the past, the future, or the
counterfactual (try expressing these with 2-word
grammars):
(iii) The problem was solved three years ago.
(iv) The problem will be solved tomorrow.
(v) The problem would have been solved if it wasn’t
for a computer glitch.
42
Agrammatism
 Kolk (2006): with Dutch and German agrammatic
speakers, preventive adaptation results in a bias to use
simpler syntactic constructions, including root small
clauses and root infinitives
 Whereas control speakers produced 10% non-finite
clauses, aphasics produced about 60%
 In children, the overuse of non-finite clauses
decreased with age: from 83% in the 2-year-olds, to
60% in the 2.5-year-olds, to 40% in the 3-year-olds
 A PET study by Indefrey et al. (2001) shows that nonfinite clauses require less grammatical work
43
Specific Language Disorder
 Specific Language Disorder is characterized, among other
symptoms, by the delay or deficit in the use of auxiliary
verbs, tense and agreement (TP elements), as well as of
other functional categories
 A mutation on FOXP2 gene responsible for the disorder
(Lai et al. 2001); mutation underwent selection
 Some recent experiments suggest that the specifically
human FOXP2 mutations are responsible for growing
longer neurites (axons and dendrites) in the brain,
establishing better connectivity among neurons (Sonja
Vernes, Max Planck Institute, LSA Institute Workshop Lecture, New
Insights from Genetics, June 29, 2013). This was established by
copying human mutations into the FOXP2 of mice.
44
Synergy
While syntactic theory can help identify protostructures, and distinguish them from more complex
structures, neuroscience can test if these distinctions
are correlated with a different degree and distribution
of brain activation, and genetics can, among other
possibilities, shed light on the role of some specific
genes in making such connections in the brain
possible.
45
Correlations and subtractions
 Converging evidence in the literature showing that increased
syntactic complexity corresponds to increased neural
activity in certain specific areas of the brain (see e.g. Caplan
2001; Indefrey et al. 2001; Just et al. 1996).
 Pallier et al. (2011) found a positive correlation between the levels
of hierarchical structure and the degree of activation; used 12
word strings, varying whether these 12 words were a single
sentence, two or more shorter sentences, or just random strings.
 Brennan et al. (2012): a naturalistic 12-minute story-telling
experiment. Each word in the story was analyzed for its level of
hierarchical embedding, and the degree of embedding was
found to correlate with the amount of activation in the
anterior temporal lobes, as well as in the left posterior temporal
lobe, left IFG, and medial prefrontal cortex.
46
Some predictions for proto-grammars
(joint work with Noa Ofen, WSU Gerontology/Pediatrics)
 While the processing of TPs and transitives with vP
shells is expected to show more clear lateralization in
the left hemisphere, with more extensive activation of
the Broca’s areas,
 the processing of proto structures, root small clauses
and absolutive-type constructions, as well as middles,
is expected to show less lateralization, and less
involvement of the Broca’s areas,
 but more reliance on both hemispheres, as well as,
possibly, more reliance on the subcortical structures of
the brain (e.g. Lieberman 2000)
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Fossils are often formulaic
(i) Noting ventured, nothing gained. Easy come, easy go.
(ii) Problem solved. Case closed. Point taken. Mission accomplished.
(iii)
Pala
karta.
‘Card laid, card played.’ (Serbian)
(iv)
(v)
fell.PART card
Prošo
voz.
‘The opportunity has passed.’
gone.PART
train
Preko preče, naokolo bliže. ‘Across shorter, around closer.’
 Code (2005: 317): stereotypical/formulaic uses of language might
represent fossilized clues to its evolutionary origins
 they involve more ancient processing patterns, including more
involvement of the basal ganglia, thalamus, limbic structures, and the
right hemisphere (also van Lancker & Cummings 1999; Bradshaw 2001)
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Conclusion
 There is ample room for a language system with only short and flat




(intransitive, absolutive-like) sentences; such (fossil) structures still
live in various guises in all human languages
This approach combines a reconstruction method based on syntactic
theory with identification of syntactic fossils
Fossil structures are shown to be built into the very foundation of more
complex structures, thus explaining many properties of the language
design itself, as well as language variation
This approach is compatible with natural/sexual selection: each new
layer of structure brings concrete and tangible incremental
advantages, at least some of which could have been targeted by
selection (e.g. two-word insults; less vagueness; displacement;
transitivity; the expression of tense; nested recursion)
This approach can mediate among the fields of syntax, neuroscience,
and genetics; evolutionary considerations provide the point of contact
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Thank you!
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