Víctor M. Longa

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.

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.