All or nothing: No half-Merge and the evolution of syntax
Name
journal.pbio.3000539.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
345.35 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
107d6043185183f85acb83e3143042ac
Author(s)
Berwick, Robert C
Chomsky, Avram Noam
Date Issued
November 2019
Journal
PLoS Biology
Publisher
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Citation
Berwick, Robert C. and Noam Chomsky. "All or nothing: No half-Merge and the evolution of syntax." PLoS Biology 17, 11 (November 2019): e3000539 © 2019 Berwick and Chomsky
Version
Final published version
Abstract
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. In their Essay on the evolution of human language, Martins and Boeckx seek to refute what they call the "half-Merge fallacy" - the conclusion that the most elementary computational operation for human language syntax, binary set formation, or "Merge," evolved in a single step. We show that their argument collapses. It is based on a serious misunderstanding of binary set formation as well as formal language theory. Furthermore, their specific evolutionary scenario counterproposal for a "two-step" evolution of Merge does not work. Although we agree with their Essay on several points, including that there must have been many steps in the evolution of human language and the importance of understanding how language and language syntax are implemented in the brain, we disagree that there is any justification, empirical or conceptual, for the decomposition of binary set formation into separate steps.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000539
