Basic Operations: Minimal Syntax-Semantics

In this programmatic paper, we articulate a minimalist conception of linguistic composition, syntactic and semantic, with the aim of identifying fundamental operations invoked by the human faculty of language (HFL). 1. Introduction For these purposes, we take it as given that humans have such a faculty, stable states of which can be described as I-languages in Chomsky's (1986) sense. Idealizing, one can describe HFL as a biologically implemented capacity to acquire and use (in normal conditions of experience) one or more recursive procedures that associate phonological instructions to articulatory/perceptual systems with semantic instructions to conceptual/intentional systems, by means of a constrained syntax; cp. Chomsky (1995). Abstracting from phonology, we assume that expressions of an I-language are semantic instructions whose structural properties are determined by (i) principles governing the combination of I-language elements, and (ii) constraints on how HFL can naturally " interface with " other aspects of cognition. From this perspective, one joint task for syntacticians and semanticists is to specify the relevant elements and structural properties, along with a biologically implementable algorithm for generating complex expressions, which can be treated as instructions to construct mental representations of some kind from language-independent cognitive resources. In developing a specific proposal, we also want to stress two dovetailing points. First, while "poverty of stimulus" arguments reveal the inadequacy of empiricist accounts of language acquisition, appealing to innate principles is only a first step towards explaining how and why children acquire the languages they do. Second, morals from the study of vision remain relevant for the study of language; see Poeppel and Embick (2005), discussed below. Regarding the first point, we take it as given that HFL respects logically contingent language-specific constraints, which can be described as an innate Universal Grammar (UG) that all children use in acquiring their sundry I-languages. This raises familiar questions about language variation. But even if nativists can account for such variation, say in terms of lexical and parametric differences, getting beyond a mere description of the child's innate endowment requires some account of how constraints of UG are enforced by HFL and why those constraints are the ones enforced. Could a different faculty—one that imposed alternative constraints on acquirable languages— have emerged from the available biological building blocks. Or is HFL the only linguistic system that creatures like us could have had? Or was there a small range of possibilities, with a combination of selective pressure and …