Semantic-Driven Emergence of Syntax : The Principle of Compositionality upside-down

In Chomskyan views of linguistics, syntax is a preeminent independent level whose knowledge is mainly innate. Semantics is then usually seen as a secondary structure deduced from the syntactic analysis. The Principle of Compositionality is, in this context, a precise way of specifying the passage from syntax to semantics. But from an emergence perspective, this conception is very awkward. As a matter of fact, the ability to communicate meanings is of far higher priority than the ability to build a formal grammar, so semantics must precede syntax. We still assume a computational point of view on syntax and semantics, but we propose to reinterpret the Principle of Compositionality to show that syntax can derive from semantics. The idea, inspired by recent results in the domain of Machine Learning, is to prove that a grammar can be completely specified by the description of the way semantic items (roughly corresponding with word meanings) are combined into global meanings. We thus provide theoretical arguments to avoid strong hypotheses about the innateness of syntax.