From Action to Typology? A Neuro-evolutionary Perspective

The article offers an assessment of David Kemmerer's article ‘The Cross-Linguistic Prevalence of SOV and SVO Word Orders Reflects the Sequential and Hierarchical Representation of Action in Broca's Area’ in the context of the question, ‘How did biological evolution yield a language-ready brain?’ We argue that the path from praxic actions to grammatical structure is indirect and that comparative neurobiology of human and monkey and computational modeling of neural circuitry may both play a role complementary to that of human neurology and neurolinguistics in tracing the intricacies of that path. We conclude that (a) Kemmerer's focus on BA44 ignores the involvement of a larger system and that the key factor of subject salience is determined by regions outside BA44 supporting the perceptual salience of people within a scene; (b) the ability to process ‘non-canonical’ structures (i.e., structures with a non-default mapping between syntax and semantics) may have been crucial in the evolution of language, and (c) that constituent hierarchies (i.e., the ability to express increasingly more complex information by increasing constituent complexity) also play a particularly important role in explaining the communicative power of language.