2017 Volume 21 Issue 1 Pages 88-104
The study on language origins and evolution had been considered a pipe dream for more than a century. Even in the 1990s, there were external and internal barriers to academic research on this topic, which caused some serious clashes between linguists and biologists. However, the Merge-only hypothesis of human language evolution has opened a door to resolve the clashes and establish scientific methods for modern evolutionary linguistics. This article introduces such a new scenario and offers its empirical evidence from phonology. Specifically, I argue that the “Third Factor” played a key role in the shift from Merge and the SM interface in proto-language to human phonology. This view makes explicit the reason why we can explore language origins, the hardest problem in science, from languages at hand, and helps us establish specific methods for exploring it in phonology. Empirical tests for this view involve the typology of palatal phonotactics in Japanese and English.
