Making sense of language in the light of evolution

Inquiry into language evolution has been controversial, mainly because there is no consensus as to the nature of both evolution' and language.' Berwick and Chomsky make sense of the evolution of language by treating it as a biological phenomenon. In contrast to functional characterizations of language as communication' or speech,' the authors define it as, essentially, a mind-internal computational mechanism. Within their minimalist approach, hierarchical syntactic structure is achieved through the recursive application of a basic operation called Merge.' The simplicity of the basic operation is consistent with archeological evidence suggesting an evolutionary recent origin of language.