Reintegrating Linguistics

The Question

How can linguistic theory be reconnected with broader fundamental questions about cognition and evolution? Current theories of cross-linguistic patterns in word order assume a very richly structured innate syntactic system with many detailed constraints on how words can be arranged. While this view captures important empirical generalizations, it leaves open two major questions: how language relates to other cognitive capacities, and how such a highly specialized system could have evolved.

The Reintegrating Linguistics project explores a different possibility: that much of language’s structure arises from constraints on meaning rather than from syntax. On this view, languages share strong restrictions on how meanings can be packaged. Many unattested word orders (i.e., those that never appear across languages) are ruled out not because they are syntactically impossible, but because they would correspond to implausible or cognitively unusable meanings. If correct, this framework would substantially simplify our understanding of the innate linguistic system and could lead to new avenues connecting linguistic structure to other domains of cognition and to biological evolution.

The Approach

To investigate this, the Reintegrating Linguistics research team is combining three approaches: theory, typology and computation. Theoretically, they develop explicit models in which constraints on meaning, rather than innate syntactic templates, account for observed word ordering patterns. Typologically, they test these models using detailed cross-linguistic data on the ordering of a wide range of linguistic elements across a large and diverse set of languages. Computationally, they use models of cultural evolution to study how simple assumptions about the innate system and constraints on meaning can, over generations, give rise to the typological patterns observed across the world’s languages.

Together, these approaches will help develop a linguistic system that highlights the connections between linguistic and extra-linguistic cognition, relates these connections to biological evolution, and examines how they shape our experience of the world.

The Reintegrating Linguistics project is being led by Roni Katzir at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and Viola Schmitt at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US.

Feature image: How has human linguistic ability evolved? What constrains the possible hierarchical orderings that underlie linguistic utterances? (Images by Josephine Pryde)