Free The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky Page A

– basically, finding that out is the MinimalistProgram: how much is accounted for by this one innovation? On Merge itself, every theory agrees; if you have a system with infinitely many hierarchically organized expressions, you have Merge or something equivalent, at the very least, whatever the formulation is. We just take for granted that Merge came along somewhere, and you can more or less time it. Then the question is, given that and the external conditions that language has to meet – interface conditions and independent properties of organisms, or maybe beyond organisms (physical laws and so on and so forth) – how much of language is determined by them? That's a research question – a lot more so than I would have guessed ten years or so ago.
    JM: OK, continuing on the list, what aboutphonological and phonetic features and properties?
    NC: Well, there's no doubt that there's a specific array of them and you can't just make up any one. And they are plainly attuned to thesensory-motor apparatus[; they meet interface conditions without, of course, being ‘about’ them]. In fact, the same is true if you use a different modality like sign: what you do is attuned to the sensory-motor apparatus; it [sign] doesn't use phonetic features, but some counterpart. The same kinds of questions arise about them as about lexical concepts. It's just that they – the phonetic features – are easier to study. Not that it's easy. Here at MIT there has been half a century of serious work with high-tech equipment trying to figure out what they are, so it doesn't come easily; but at least it's a much more easily formulable problem. Also, on the sensory-motor side, you can imagine comparative evolutionary evidence. On the lexical-semantic side, you can't even think of anycomparative evidence that works. But [on the sensory-motor side] other organisms have sensory-motor systems; they're very much like ours, it appears. So you might be able to trace origins. That's the usual hard problem with evolutionary theory. So far as we know, most of those areprecursors of language. It's possible that there's adaptation of the sensory-motor system to language – that's likely – but just what it is is very hard to say.
    JM: Is there evolutionary evidence from other primates for sensory-motor systems, or primarily from other creatures?
    NC: Other primates? Well, they have tongues and ears, and so on, but it's . . .
    JM: Not the famous dropped larynx .
    NC: Well, they don't have the dropped larynx, but other organisms do – they've been found in deer, I think (Fitch & Reby 2001 ); but that doesn't seem critical. It's not very clear what difference it would make. You wouldn't be able to pronounce some sounds but you'd be able to pronounce others. But humans learn language and use it freely with highly defective sensory-motor systems, or no control of the sensory-motor system at all. That's one of the things that Eric Lenneberg found –discovered, actually – fifty years ago. [He discovered] thatchildren with dysarthria [no control over their articulatory systems] – who were thought not to have language by the people raising them, training them, etc – he discovered they did. He discovered this by standing behind them and saying something and noticing their reactions. There's more recent work. So you don't require – in fact you don't even have to use it; sign language doesn't use it – so it's very hard to see that there could be any argument from sensory-motor evidence for not developing language. But also the system seems to have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, as far as we can tell from fossil evidence. But there's no indication of anything like language use or the whole set of cognitive capacities that appear to have developed along with it.
    Think about it in plain evolutionary terms. Somewhere along the line a mutation took place that led to the rewiring of the brain to give youMerge. That everyone should accept,