A SENSORIMOTOR CHARACTERISATION OF SYNTAX, AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR MODELS OF LANGUAGE EVOLUTION

In this paper I consider the possibility that language is more strongly grounded in sensorimotor cognition than is normally assumed—a scenario which would be providential for language evolution theorists. I argue that the syntactic theory most compatible with this scenario, perhaps surprisingly, is generative grammar. I suggest that there may be a way of interpreting the syntactic structures posited in one theory of generative grammar (Minimalism) as descriptions of sensorimotor processing, and discuss the implications of this for models of language evolution.