HOW COMPLEX SYNTAX COULD BE

摘要

Syntax is so complex that linguists have not so far managed to determine thesyntactic system of any language, but children learn syntax unproblematically.While some degree of syntactic complexity is certainly an essential part of a communication system as expressive as human language, it is hard to motivateany selective advantage obtained through some of the more irregular and idiosyncratic aspects of language. We show that if large parts of the humangenome came to influence grammaticality patterns in syntactic structuresthrough a process such as exaptation, then the syntax of human languages wouldbe learned easily by children, but would be resistant to analysis usingconventional linguistic techniques. We suggest that this scenario is wellsupported by currently available evidence concerning the nature of modernsyntactic systems, and so conclude that it is very unlikely that it will ever bepossible to write a complete generative grammar for any language.