ArticlePLoS biology2019
Language evolution and complexity considerations: The no half-Merge fallacy.
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 10 papers.
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10 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- Three mechanisms of language comprehension are revealed through cluster analysis of individuals with language deficits.NPJ science of learning · 2024Article
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- Elephants as an animal model for self-domestication.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- An economic model and evidence of the evolution of human intelligence in the Middle Pleistocene: Climate change and assortative mating.PloS one · 2023Article
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Vocal learning: Beyond the continuum.PLoS biology · 2020Article
- Evolutionary Dynamics Do Not Motivate a Single-Mutant Theory of Human Language.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- All or nothing: No half-Merge and the evolution of syntax.PLoS biology · 2019Article
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Abstract
Recently, prominent theoretical linguists have argued for an explicit scenario for the evolution of the human language capacity on the basis of its computational properties. Concretely, the simplicity of a minimalist formulation of the operation Merge, which allows humans to recursively compute hierarchical relations in language, has been used to promote a sudden-emergence, single-mutation scenario. In support of this view, Merge is said to be either fully present or fully absent: one cannot have half-Merge. On this basis, it is inferred that the emergence of our fully fledged language capacity had to be sudden. Thus, proponents of this view draw a parallelism between the formal complexity of the operation at the computational level and the number of evolutionary steps it must imply. Here, we examine this argument in detail and show that the jump from the atomicity of Merge to a single-mutation scenario is not valid and therefore cannot be used as justification for a theory of language evolution along those lines.
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