ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2017
Linear grammar as a possible stepping-stone in the evolution of language.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Utterance evolution: the road to generative, combinatorial communicators.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Do Language Models Know Who Did What to Whom?Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Memetics and the Parallel Architecture.Topics in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Syntax and the brain: language evolution as the missing link(ing theory)?Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Call combinations and compositional processing in wild chimpanzees.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Human language evolution: a view from theoretical linguistics on how syntax and the lexicon first came into being.Primates; journal of primatology · 2022Article
- Syntax Acquisition in Healthy Adults and Post-Stroke Individuals: The Intriguing Role of Grammatical Preference, Statistical Learning, and Education.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Child-directed speech is optimized for syntax-free semantic inference.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Remarks on Multimodality: Grammatical Interactions in the Parallel Architecture.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2021Article
- Structured Sequence Learning: Animal Abilities, Cognitive Operations, and Language Evolution.Topics in cognitive science · 2020Review
- Composition is the Core Driver of the Language-selective Network.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2020Article
- The grammar of emoji? Constraints on communicative pictorial sequencing.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2019Article
- Infinite Generation of Language Unreachable From a Stepwise Approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- The evolution of the capacity for language: the ecological context and adaptive value of a process of cognitive hijacking.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Article
- Empirical approaches to the study of language evolution.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2017Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
We suggest that one way to approach the evolution of language is through reverse engineering: asking what components of the language faculty could have been useful in the absence of the full complement of components. We explore the possibilities offered by linear grammar, a form of language that lacks syntax and morphology altogether, and that structures its utterances through a direct mapping between semantics and phonology. A language with a linear grammar would have no syntactic categories or syntactic phrases, and therefore no syntactic recursion. It would also have no functional categories such as tense, agreement, and case inflection, and no derivational morphology. Such a language would still be capable of conveying certain semantic relations through word order-for instance by stipulating that agents should precede patients. However, many other semantic relations would have to be based on pragmatics and discourse context. We find evidence of linear grammar in a wide range of linguistic phenomena: pidgins, stages of late second language acquisition, home signs, village sign languages, language comprehension (even in fully syntactic languages), aphasia, and specific language impairment. We also find a full-blown language, Riau Indonesian, whose grammar is arguably close to a pure linear grammar. In addition, when subjects are asked to convey information through nonlinguistic gesture, their gestures make use of semantically based principles of linear ordering. Finally, some pockets of English grammar, notably compounds, can be characterized in terms of linear grammar. We conclude that linear grammar is a plausible evolutionary precursor of modern fully syntactic grammar, one that is still active in the human mind.
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