ArticlePLoS biology2019
All or nothing: No half-Merge and the evolution of syntax.
Article in PLoS biology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Merge-based syntax is mediated by distinct neurocognitive mechanisms in 84,000 individuals with language deficits across nine languages.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Third-order self-embedded vocal motifs in wild orangutans, and the selective evolution of recursion.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Linguistic capacity was present in theFrontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- How (and why) languages became more complex as we evolved more prosocial: the human self-domestication view.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Syntax-like Structures in Maternal Contact Calls of Chestnut-Crowned Babblers (International journal of primatology · 2024Article
- No evidence for language syntax in songbird vocalizations.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Expanding the causal menu: An interventionist perspective on explaining human behavioural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Sociality predicts orangutan vocal phenotype.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- A Connectomic Hypothesis for the Hominization of the Brain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Article
- Differentiation Between Agents and Patients in the Putative Two-Word Stage of Language Evolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
In their Essay on the evolution of human language, Martins and Boeckx seek to refute what they call the "half-Merge fallacy"-the conclusion that the most elementary computational operation for human language syntax, binary set formation, or "Merge," evolved in a single step. We show that their argument collapses. It is based on a serious misunderstanding of binary set formation as well as formal language theory. Furthermore, their specific evolutionary scenario counterproposal for a "two-step" evolution of Merge does not work. Although we agree with their Essay on several points, including that there must have been many steps in the evolution of human language and the importance of understanding how language and language syntax are implemented in the brain, we disagree that there is any justification, empirical or conceptual, for the decomposition of binary set formation into separate steps.
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