The End of Development

It is an organ, it is new, but it is not a new organ. Conceptualizing language from a homological perspective

“…We ourselves have appealed to this dichotomy for methodological reasons (Balari and Lorenzo, 2013, Chap. 1), but we have also emphasized that such a dualistic conception has no place in a truly evolutionary developmental approach, for there is no real distinction between the development of the brain and the acquisition of language (Dove, 2012;Balari and Lorenzo, 2015, for a congenial view). We are in fact convinced that the ontological problem can be overridden by taking seriously the agenda of developmental models of cultural evolution like those proposed by Griesemer and Wimsatt, incorporating such notions as "developmental hybrid" (Wimsatt and Griesemer, 2007;Wimsatt, 2013;Griesemer, 2014a,b;Minelli, 2014), to give rise to a more integrative interdisciplinary approach (Love and Lugar, 2013).…”

Evolution of Language. Continuity and Discontinuity through Models and Empirical Data

“…Such an epistemological position appears even more striking if we consider that within the framework of cognitive science several approaches to the study of language have shown that the hypothesis of a species-cognitive specificity of human language is not at all incompatible with its evolutionary history (Rosas, 2013;Miyagawa et al, 2014;Balari & Lorenzo, 2015). All of Chomsky's biolinguistics arguments paving the way to a drastically emergent hypothesis are in fact due to the break they propose between the development of the two technologies, body and mind, the structure and the function, which are always occurring in the human linguistic machine.…”

The internal, the external and the hybrid: The state of the art and a new characterization of language as a natural object

“…Attending to such a problematic landscape, Balari and Lorenzo (2015a) tentatively outline the idea that agreement material is so conspicuous in languages because it helps to strengthen and stabilize the computational system that underlies the processing of internal linguistic expressions. The thesis put forward thus boils down to the idea that agreement items are there-in the words of Minelli (2003)-for their "developmental role," which also according to Minelli is "prior" to any other role whatsoever that units of the corresponding realms may later acquire in their respective organic contexts.…”

“…Observing that agreement affixes are typically involved in these kinds of indeterminately distant connections-e.g. a boy 1 who no one 2 except me knows 2 arrives 1 , Balari and Lorenzo (2015a) claim that said units have the developmental role of eliciting, exciting and guiding the exercise of the working space of the human computational system, until it attains its proper storage capacity. Note that the idea is compatible with the possibility that later on other functions hitchhike on the same items.…”

“…For example, some pluralist positions underscore the necessity of telling apart the external and the internal concept of language, granting existence to both their referents and relating them with different kinds of evolutionary dynamics. This position was defended, for example, by Balari & Lorenzo (2013: Chapter 1) for methodological reasons-but discarded afterwards (Balari & Lorenzo 2015a), as well as in Bickerton (2014: Chapter 9), whose diagnostic of the overall situation is summed up in the following passage, which focuses on the particular case of syntax:…”