ABSTRACT
The surprising fact about minimalism, in my view, is not that we seek economy, but that we actually find it. Biological evolution, to begin with, does not explain it, if seen in the realistic light that Gould (1991: 59-60) provides:
Those characteristics [such as vision] that we share with other closely related species are most likely to be conventional adaptations. But attributes unique to our species are likely to be exaptations.1 . . . As an obvious prime candidate, consider . . . human language. The adaptationist and Darwinian tradition has long advocated a gradualistic continuationism . . . Noam Chomsky, on the other hand, has long advocated a position corresponding to the claim that language is an exaptation of brain structure. . . . The traits that Chomsky (1986b) attributes to language – universality of the generative grammar, lack of ontogeny, . . . highly peculiar and decidedly non-optimal structure, formal analogy to other attributes, including our unique numerical faculty with its concept of discrete infinity – fit far more easily with an exaptive, rather than an adaptive, explanation. [My emphasis.]
Of course, one must be careful about what is meant by “non-optimal structure.” The structure of language is not functionally optimal, as garden paths show
for parsing structure, and effability considerations (the grammar allows us to say less than we otherwise could) for producing structure. Lightfoot (1995) stresses this aspect of Gould’s view, in the familiar spirit of Chomsky’s work. Then again, the issue arises as to whether the structure of language is non-optimal as well, as the prevailing rhetoric of the 1980s presumed. The view at that time was that finding non-optimal structures is an excellent way of defending the specificity of the linguistic system as a biological exaptation (hence as a natural, independent phenomenon of mind in the strongest sense, with little or no connection to communication processes and all that). However, Chomsky (1986b) already showed that the linguistic practice was far removed from this rhetoric. Thus, the working details of this piece of research showed an example of optimality in syntax, as exemplified by the notion of Movement “as a last resort.”
