Cedric Boeckx

Language Evolution: Pluralism Instead of Minimalism

The Minimalism Program failed to deliver its promises. As it considered “Plato’s problem” (the logical problem of language acquisition) “solved”, and shifted from learnability to evolvability considerations, the cracks began to show. Neither Plato’s problem, nor its cousin, Darwin’s problem (the logical problem of language evolution) got solved, and the prospects are very grim indeed for reductionist approaches. In this talk I’ll review work we have been doing in recent years in the context of language evolution, show how they can be integrated with findings from other disciplines (as well as other research traditions in linguistics), and hopefully convince you that this is a more promising path to explore questions that have long been made more difficult because of harmful dichotomies.