Bešlin invited to Budapest

Simplifying grammar to explain evolution and acquisition.

September 28, Maša Bešlin presents an invited talk for the Theoretical and Experimental Syntax Group within the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, on "The Darwin-Plato tension, grammatical primitives, and linguistic principles," which pushes for minimization of grammatical categories and principles in the service of explaining the evolution of language and the acquisition of languages. An abstact of the talk is below.

I will begin by discussing the tension between Plato’s problem and Darwin’s problem. Plato’s problem acknowledges that children come to possess linguistic knowledge that is vastly more complex than anything they can reasonably be expected to have learned based on linguistic input alone. To surpass this problem, linguists working in the GB framework argued for an ever-richer initial state of the Language Faculty. On the other hand, taking seriously the cognitive reality of Language and its absence in our primate cousins means that Language must have evolved in the mind/brain rather suddenly. Given that evolution triggers only small innovations at any given time, the Darwinian perspective favors a streamlined conception of the Language Faculty. One way we can approach this apparent tension is to strive to formulate simple, yet empirically adequate, descriptions and explanations of linguistic phenomena.

I will first briefly discuss my work on participles which recognizes the above tension and attempts to reduce the number of grammatical primitives. I argue that participles are not an independent lexical category; instead, I show that they are deverbal adjectives in a number of languages. I then discuss the payoff of this result in terms of simplifying the languages acquisition process.

I will then present my ongoing work on locality domains in syntax and in morphophonology which asks
whether the locality principles in these two modules of the grammar can be equated. Looking at
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian adjectives, I show that they are domain-delimiters in the morphophonology, but not in the syntax. On a classical phase-theoretic view of locality (Chomsky 2000, 2001), it appears that DM-phasehood and ‘big syntax’-phasehood cannot be reconciled (contra Marantz 2001, 2007, a.o.). I will conclude by discussing some alternatives.