Syntax, recursion, productivity – a usage-based perspective on the evolution of grammar

In recent years, the issue of the origins of human language has clearly been restored as an honorable topic of investigation. After having opposed any evolutionary perspective on the faculty of language for many years (e.g. Chomsky 1975), even Chomsky now not only recognizes that such a perspective is important, but also that it may actually be investigated in a scientific manner (cf. Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002). However, that very paper and the most extensive criticisms of it that have so far been published (Pinker & Jackendoff 2005, Jackendoff & Pinker 2005) also testify to the truth and the topical relevance of the first motto above, an insight formulated by Bybee several years before: a particular view of the nature of grammar, syntax in particular, is a (if not: the) major determinant of answers to the question of language origins that an investigator is at all willing to consider. In asking the evolutionary question how we got from ‘there’ to ‘here’, possible answers are constrained and strongly informed by our ideas of what it is to be ‘here’. In this paper, I want to explore the perspective on grammar offered by the study of patterns in actual language use, and the kind of (partial) answers to the question of origins that this suggests, in opposition to some more or less standard assumptions about syntax as part of a language system. I will largely be drawing on research that I have been involved in myself.