CTOE

Hello! This is David’s Current Theory Of Everything (at least, everything in published posts thus far).

See episode one for context.

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Laws and Rules

Eevee’s Laws

1. A syntactic system must have have been adaptive at each stage of its evolution, or it must have been ‘pulled along’ by an adaptive trait.

2. A syntactic system must be representable and executable by our brains.

3. A syntactic system must enable children to acquire language from their surroundings rapidly, in the way human children do.

Pengli’s Law

Pengli’s Law: Anything in syntax that is not Merge or phonology is semantics.

this is Pengli. he came up with this law.

Minimalist Syntax

Features and Agree

All syntactic variation is drawn from the featural makeup and presence or absence of items in the lexicon. Syntactic nodes have interpretable and uninterpretable features:

Interpretable features: features a word has.
Uninterpretable features: features a word wants in other words it combines with.

If uninterpretable features are left in a syntax tree after it is finished, the tree fails. To get rid of uninterpretable features, a node must combine with interpretable features of the same type:

The Sisterhood Principle: Uninterpretable features can only be interpreted by the interpretable features of their sister.

This process of interpretation is known as Agree. The node with the uninterpretable feature loses that feature, and gains the interpretable feature of its sister. For example, a noun with uninterpretable [uCase] might gain [Case: NOM] from the Tense head, deleting [uCase] in the process. Then, [Case: NOM] might be realized morphologically as a nominative ending on the noun.

Merge, Project, Move, and Chain Reduction

Syntax can be reduced to the operation Merge:

Merge: take syntactic nodes A and B, and create their parent node, either A: {A, B} or B: {A, B}.

Project is a consequence of the ‘labeling algorithm’ (what determines whether you choose A: {A, B} or B: {A, B}. We haven’t found a good labeling algorithm yet but it’s coming!

Move, otherwise known as ‘internal Merge’, is just when you re-Merge something you’ve already merged. We don’t get duplicate words because of Chain Reduction:

Chain Reduction: only the topmost version of a word is pronounced.

How Language Works

Production

1. A meaning exists in my head. We’ll model this meaning with its logical form: likes(x, chocolate) & mom(me, x). A logical form is a translation of a meaning into some form of predicate logic. We’ll worry about the exact form later.

2. I search through the lexicon of my language, figuring out which words are necessary to express this logical form. In English these words are “like,” “mom,” and “chocolate,” as well as some form of “me.” Then I put these words into an order in my head, and inflect them in various ways. For some reason I settle on “my mom likes chocolate” as the order and inflection that represents the logical form above.

3. I figure out the phonological forms of each word, and say them one after another: [mäjˈmämlɐjksˈtʃɔkɫɪʔ].

Comprehension

1. You hear [mäjˈmämlɐjksˈtʃɔkɫɪʔ], and break it up into a series of distinct phonological ‘words,’ which you then put into a sentence by matching them to the phonological forms of words in your lexicon: my mom likes chocolate.

2. You somehow get from that sequence of words to the meaning that I intended, in logical form: likes(x, chocolate) & mom(me, x).

The Evolution of Language

Humans probably had phonology and conceptual structure before we evolved compositional language. Our phonology was probably somewhat similar to that of birds, whales, and other animals with ‘song’, and it probably had something to do with the evolution of music as well.