Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

A standard observation in linguistics is that every child learning a language changes it, and develops a mental grammar that is slightly distant from that of other members of her speech community (to be understood as a social network). Because every speaker-learner internalizes a mental grammar of her own, the cumulative effect over several generations leads to E-language change. Therefore, I- and E-languages change constantly.  Here is the puzzle: Given these three points, thousands of years of human evolution would make one expect the range of  cross-linguistic structural variation to be a lot wider than what typologists actually observe. Why is linguistic structural variation so severely restricted? In this talk, I argue that only phrase left peripheral properties are subject to structural variation (to some extent). If the Left Periphery is a Phase, then linguistic variation is a Phase-level property.