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Biolinguistics and Historical Linguistics| title | Biolinguistics and Historical Linguistics |
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| start_date | 2022/11/02 |
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| schedule | 10h30-13h - Heure de Tucson |
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| online | yes |
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| visio | https://arizona.zoom.us/j/83059854210 |
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| location_info | En ligne |
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| summary | Biolinguistics investigates the biological foundations of language. Originally, the answer as to how children acquire language so effortlessly is seen as rooted in Universal Grammar (UG). Language acquisition is not imitation but an interaction between UG and exposure to a particular language. UG is “the system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages not merely by accident but by necessity – of course, I mean biological, not logical, necessity” (Chomsky 1975: 29). However, although UG received a lot of attention, “principles of neural organization … deeply grounded in physical law” and the general “capacity to acquire knowledge” are acknowledged, even in the early period (Chomsky 1965: 59). Recently, these have been emphasized more, and have come to be known as third factor principles. Third factor principles include Minimal Search, Determinacy, and Economy and can be seen at work in specific syntactic structures and restrictions on them.
This lecture explores the insights Historical Linguistics provides to Biolinguistic inquiry. Regular and systematic language change shows that phrases reanalyze as heads and that lexical heads reanalyze as functional heads. These changes can be understood as due to pressure from Third Factors. Since third factors bias the acquisition, a language learner may simplify the input in accordance with third factors resulting in more economic derivations. Languages also innovate in pragmatically motivated ways. Thus, language change involves a balancing act between economy and extravagance, the latter not constrained by third factors. In this lecture, I will give copious examples of linguistic change from a broad variety of languages and then zoom in on three areas: (a) the role of grammaticalization (verbs reanalyzing as auxiliaries) in language acquisition and language evolution, (b) the role of renewal through adjunct incorporation, and (c) the thematic structure of human language in acquisition and change and what this tells us about the proto-language. All three areas provide glimpses of the shape of the Faculty of Language. |
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| responsibles | Piatelli-Palmarini, Chomsky, Bever |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2022/09/09 12:28 UTC |
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