Beyond universals: exploring the conditions of language

Balthasar Bickel, University of Zurich

Recent research has identified increasing problems in the traditional quest for universals of human language: the traditional quest suffers, in the Greenbergian tradition, from sampling problems and unclear causal modelling and, in the Chomskyan tradition, from dwindling support from learnability theory and evolutionary evidence. I will suggest that we move beyond this traditional quest and instead approach the evolution and distribution of linguistic structures from a predictive perspective, starting with the social/historical and biological/cognitive conditions within which languages operate and evolve over time. I will illustrate this with a case study on how population history and processing preferences jointly predict the way grammatical relation structures have developed across the globe. [link]