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Manuscript in Preparation
Language as an Organism
- Implications for the Evolution and Acquisition of Language
Morten H. Christiansen
Program in Neural, Informational and Behavioral Sciences
University of Southern California
University Park MC-2520
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520
Abstract
Most would agree that ultimately language has to be tied to the
phylogeny and ontogeny of human biology, but the nature of this link
is the focus of much controversy. The discussions have typically
revolved around two dichotomies, debating (a) whether evolution should
be couched in terms of exaptationist or adaptationist processes, and
(b) whether language acquisition should be explained within the
framework of nativism or empiricism. In this paper, I present a
learning- and processing-based theory of the origin and subsequent
evolution of language - a theory which cuts across the two
dichotomies. Specifically, I propose to construe language as an
organism, arguing that language has evolved to fit human learning and
processing mechanisms, rather than vice versa . It is
further suggested that the key to understanding linguistic change is
vocabulary growth, forcing morphological regularization and subsequent
increases in syntactic complexity. This approach promises to explain
linguistic universals in functional terms, and motivates an account of
language acquisition which incorporates innate, but not
language-specific constraints on the learning process. From this
perspective, I re-appraise the purported poverty of the stimulus and
conclude that linguistic structure may be learnable by learning
mechanisms not specific to language.
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