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Innate Mechanisms for Acquiring Syntactic Displacement

The central arguments within Lenneberg’s thesis of a biological basis for language are the species-specific nature of the physiological and neurological structures that make language possible, the cross-species uniformity of language development (the fact of its acquisition as well as its developmental path, irrespective of culture, race, etc.; excepting cases of pathology), and the transformational nature of syntax. Transformational syntax forms an important piece of support for Lenneberg’s discontinuity theory of the evolution of language, meaning that human language has not descended directly from communication systems found in non-human animals (i.e., our shared ancestors). This is because transformational syntax is also species-specific, i.e. not found in the communication systems of other animals. Transformational syntax allows us to convey complex and abstract meanings, rather than being limited to the here-and-now (e.g. alarm calls) or to simple semantic relations, and it enables us to transform our expressions through syntactic displacement, or movement. In this short paper I will address some questions about how human children come to acquire the meanings of semantically abstract predicates, how they figure out which strings of words are generated by displacing operations, and the sense in which the tools that allow children to acquire both these things are innate. The inspiration for this research can be traced to some of the central themes in Lenneberg’s important work.