Evolutionary syntax by Ljiljana Progovac (review)

This book, published within the series ‘Oxford studies in evolutionary syntax’, is a very valuable contribution to the research on the evolution of language. In broad terms, Progovac takes a gradualist stance (see also Pinker & Bloom 1990, Jackendoff 2002, Newmeyer 2005, Heine & Kuteva 2007, among many others), arguing for well-defined intermediate stages in the evolution of language, positing the existence of proto-language (and outlining its structure), and suggesting a plausible evolutionary path from proto-language to modern languages. This view is a departure from the so-called saltationalist approaches (see, for example, Fitch et al. 2005, Berwick & Chomsky 2016), the proponents of which essentially reject the existence of intermediate evolutionary stages.¹ The idea that language evolved gradually, and that the remnants of earlier stages are still present in the form of so-called living fossils, is not unique to P’s proposal (see, for example, Jackendoff 2002). What strikes me as the book’s most valuable contribution is an in-depth empirical study of two such living fossils (i.e. root small clauses and exocentric compounds), a very concrete proposal of what the stages were, and a wealth of empirical data to support the existence of living fossils in a variety of languages. While the core data in the book come from English and Serbian, supporting evidence from other Slavic languages (Polish, Russian, Macedonian), Romance languages, Riau Indonesian, Nicaraguan Sign Language, Chinese, and Twi, among others, adds a welcome crosslinguistic perspective.

In addition to linguistics, P includes insights from the fields of evolutionary biology, genetics, and neuroscience, with an eye toward encouraging cross-disciplinary research into the fundamental questions surrounding the evolution of language. Individual chapters, while focusing on syntax, provide additional evidence from language acquisition, neurolinguistic, processing, and animal communication studies to support the main claims. The appendix, coauthored with Noa Ofen, outlines possible directions for neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic research to test the hypothesis that the living fossils exist and are processed differently from their full-fledged hierarchical counterparts.

Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’, provides a general overview of the proposal, previews the main points of the subsequent chapters, and provides a rationale for using internal reconstruction as the primary research tool. The internal reconstruction method takes a given structure as primary relative to another structure if the former can exist independently of the latter but not vice versa (9).

Ch. 2, ‘The small (clause) beginnings’, focuses on so-called root small clauses as remnants of the paratactic proto-syntax stage. These come in the following varieties: ‘Mad Magazine’ sentences (Him retire), imperative/optative ones (Family first!), and participial ones (Point taken). They tend to be morphologically simple, they cannot be embedded, they do not allow their subparts to be questioned, and they can be concatenated with at most one other small clause, resulting in somewhat formulaic combinations (e.g. Easy come, easy go). In addition to impoverished syntax, such small clauses tend to have ‘specialized’ meanings, often expressing incredulity, commands, or wishes. In this chapter (and throughout the monograph), P thoughtfully acknowledges exceptions, such as the fact that many types of small clauses can be easily embedded (e.g. I consider syntax fun) and contain a source of case or functional structure (e.g. instrumental case in Russian or functional particles like the English as), or the fact that some sequences of three (rather than two) small clause combinations are also possible. The existence of such exceptions is an important aspect of the proposal that fossils did not get replaced by their more complex counterparts. Hence, the full-fledged small clauses are not expected to exhibit the same properties as their proto-syntactic ‘counterparts’.

Ch. 3, ‘The intransitive two-word stage: Absolutives, unaccusatives, and middles as precursors to transitivity’, strengthens the case for a two-word paratactic stage. It continues the discussion of small clauses, focusing on their internal structure: in particular on what P refers to as ‘absolutive-like syntax’, where a single argument can function either as a subject or an object. The choice between the two...