The language faculty that wasn't: a usage-based account of natural language recursion

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Evolutionary Biology
• Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

• The generative tradition posits a shrinking language faculty, potentially limited to recursion.
• This view faces challenges reconciling with evolutionary principles and empirical evidence.

Purpose of the Study:

• To argue that the language faculty is not exclusively defined by recursion.
• To propose that recursion in language processing emerges from domain-general sequence learning.

Main Methods:

• Examining evolutionary considerations for a language faculty.
• Conducting a case study on recursion in language.
• Synthesizing evidence from genetics, comparative psychology, and neuroscience.

Main Results:

• The ability to process recursive structures does not necessitate recursion as a grammatical property.
• Human sequence learning abilities, evolved for general purposes, were adapted for language.
• Constraints on sequence learning influenced the cultural evolution of linguistic structures.

Conclusions:

• The concept of a distinct, innate language faculty, even one focused on recursion, is likely too expansive.
• Language evolution is better understood as an adaptation of pre-existing cognitive abilities, particularly sequence learning.
• This perspective reframes our understanding of linguistic structure and human language capacity.