they would not have affected certain aspects of language as we know it
at all.All contemporary languages are characterized by an extremely
robust syntactic structure.Although the syntax of a foreign language
may appear on the surface to be dauntingly different from that of the
learner’s native tongue,research over the last few decades shows that
these differences are relatively trivial,and that the deeper principles that
underlie them are shared by all languages without exception (Chomsky
1981,1988).It is wholly implausible that such abstract principles could
have been invented consciously and deliberately,contrary to what was
suggested by those who remain ignorant of those principles or who
refuse,mainly on ideological grounds,to accept their existence (Beaken
1996).Since those principles seem to be specifically adapted for language
and to have little in common with general principles of thought or other
apparatuses that might be attributable to the human mind,it is no easy
matter to determine where they came from.So the question is,where
could the kind of variability have arisen on which pressure for an
improved syntax could work?
Workers such as Pinker and Bloom (1990) simply assume variations
in syntactic ability,without awareness of the problems this involves:just
what did that variability consist of? how was it expressed in terms of
behavioral differences? how could gradual improvements peak at a set
of exceptionless principles? and so on.The fact that those principles can
be expressed most successfully not as a set of positive admonitions but
rather as a set of constraints on otherwise unlimited potentialities only
exacerbates the problems.Although it might be possible to restate such
principles in terms of a steady state that could have been achieved by
small and gradual increments,no one has so far attempted to do so.But
failing such an attempt,any claim that syntax developed gradually
reduces to mere handwaving.
In the absence of such attempts,we can only assume that the original
state of language was wholly without syntactic structure,and that some
preexisting faculty was somehow appropriated to bring about an appar-
ently catastrophic emergence of syntax.The protolanguage that pre-
ceded this emergence would then have had no rules or principles
whatsoever.One could say,or not say,whatever combination of words
one pleased.Whereas practice would have undoubtedly have yielded
conventions that would have restricted and regularized speech outputs
to some extent,the result would not have continued to labor under the
difficulty that it lacked any units intermediate between the word and the
complete utterance.Words you get as soon as you have the idea of cre-
ating symbols for concepts you already have,and utterances you get as
soon as you add one word to another.But phrases and clauses,the inter-
mediate units in terms of which all generalizations about syntax must be158 Derek Bickerton