Guillermo Lorenzo

The archaeological record speaks: bridging anthropology and linguistics.

This paper examines the origins of language, as treated within Evolutionary Anthropology, under the light offered by a biolinguistic approach. This perspective is presented first. Next we discuss how genetic, anatomical, and archaeological data, which are traditionally taken as evidence for the presence of language, are circumstantial as such from this perspective. We conclude by discussing ways in which to address these central issues, in an attempt to develop a collaborative approach to them.

What about a (really) minimalist theory of language acquisition

Abstract The Minimalist Program introduced a new concept of language and added new content to the innateness position concerning our linguistic capacity. It also redefined the metatheoretical role of the theory of acquisition within generative grammar. This article explores at length all these issues and offers a critical survey of the disconcerting situation dominating todays relationship between syntacticians and acquisitionists.

Minimizing the genes for grammar. The minimalist program as a biological framework for the study of language

Abstract This paper examines the main ideas of the Minimalist Program (MP) with the aim of evaluating its virtues as a biological framework for the understanding of human language. Our conclusions are basically three. First, the MP favors a certain reconciliation between the abstract characterization of language and characterizations derived from other biological concerns. Second, the MP reduces the role of the genetic endowment for language and relies more on epigenetic processes, in clear agreement with other aspects of the study of the brain. Third, the MP favors an essential identification of the processes of ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of language, a rather controversial conclusion but also a very important one from a theoretical point of view.

Subject clitics and clitic recycling: locative sentences in some Iberian Romance languages

The first concern of this article is an analysis of locative sentences in the Iberian Romances. It is argued that both the existential (〈HAVE〉) and the stative (〈BE〉) construction derive from a single abstract verb. Their differences are based in the presence vs. the absence of an incorporation process over an otherwise identical lexical structure. The second topic of the paper is a study of the behavior of pronominal clitics within these sentences. It is observed that while Catalan has a rich paradigm of clitics (accusative, dative, locative, partitive), languages like Asturian, Galician and certain Spanish dialects resort to a ‘recycling’ strategy in order to palliate the deficiencies of their clitic paradigms. In this respect, we will show how accusative clitics are used as partitive, locative, and even subject clitics. We also propose some of the principles which constrain the application of this strategy. Finally, an Appendix is devoted to certain uses of the accusative clitics as modal markers, also within locative sentences. These uses are closely related with the behavior of certain clitics in Northern Italian dialects.

It is an organ, it is new, but it is not a new organ. Conceptualizing language from a homological perspective

It is a widely shared opinion among specialists that language is an evolutionary innovation, or that it contains some key evolutionary innovations. However, such claims are not based on a correspondingly consensual concept of ‘evolutionary innovation,’ but are rather expressed on atheoretical grounds. This fact has thus far acted as an obstacle for the collaborative effort upon which the task of disentangling the evolution of this human capacity should be built. In this paper, we suggest a formal approach to the issue, based on Gunter Wagner’s recent theory of homologies and novelties. Within this new framework, we conclude that language is the human instantiation (thus an ‘homolog’) of a character widely represented in the nervous system of animals, which incorporates a number of interdependent innovative states that allows us conceptualizing it as a ‘variational modality’ of this ancient organ.

Ahistorical homology and multiple realizability

The Mind-Brain Identity Theory lived a short life as a respectable philosophical position in the late 1950s, until Hilary Putnam developed his famous argument on the multiple realizability of mental states. The argument was, and still is, taken as the definitive demonstration of the falsity of Identity Theory and the foundation on which contemporary functionalist computational cognitive science was to be grounded. In this paper, in the wake of some contemporary philosophers, we reopen the case for Identity Theory and offer a solution to the problem of multiple realizabilty. The solution is based on the necessity, at the time of establishing identity relations, of appealing to the notions of “homology” and “analogy” developed in the nineteenth century by Richard Owen. We also suggest that these notions are useful in order to correct certain shortcomings of some recent attempts at rebutting the Multiple Realizability argument.

LONG-DISTANCE DEPENDENCIES ARE NOT UNIQUELY HUMAN

It is widely assumed that long-distance dependencies between elements are a unique feature of human language. Here we review recent evidence of long-distance correlations in sequences produced by non-human species and discuss two evolutionary scenarios for the evolution of human language in the light of these findings. Though applying their methodological framework, we conclude that some of Hauser, Chomsky and Fitchs central claims on language evolution are put into question to a different degree within each of those scenarios.

Long-Distance Paradox and the Hybrid Nature of Language

Non-adjacent or long-distance dependencies (LDDs) are routinely considered to be a distinctive trait of language, which purportedly locates it higher than other sequentially organized signal systems in terms of structural complexity. This paper argues that particular languages display specific resources (e.g. non-interpretive morphological agreement paradigms) that help the brain system responsible for dealing with LDDs to develop the capacity of acquiring and processing expressions with such a human-typical degree of computational complexity. Independently obtained naturalistic data is discussed and put to the service of the idea that the above-mentioned resources exert their developmental role from the outside, but in compliance with other internal resources, ultimately compounding an integrated developmental system. Parallels with other human and nonhuman developmental phenomena are explored, which point to the conclusion that the developmental system of concern can be assimilated to cases currently been conceptualized as ‘cue-response systems’ or ‘developmental hybrids’ within the ecological-developmental paradigm in theoretical biology. Such a conclusion is used to support the idea that both current externalist and internalist concepts fall short of a correct characterization of language.