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This is a book about language as a species-typical trait of humans. Linguists customarily describe it as an extremely exceptional capacity, even when compared with the biological endowment of closely related species, and this is the source of the many quarrels that exist around the aim of explaining its evolutionary origins. This book argues that language is not so exceptional after all, as according to the text it is just the human version of a rather common and conservative organic system that they refer to as the Central Computational Complex. The book argues that inter-specific variation of this organ is restricted to (i) accessible memory resources, and (ii) patterns of external connectivity, both being the result of perturbations in the system underlying its development. The book thus offers a fresh perspective on language as a naturally evolved phenomenon.

This book focuses on some of the most important issues in historical syntax. In a series of close examinations of languages from old Egyptian to modern Afrikaans, chapters present work on Afro-Asiatic, Latin and Romance, Germanic, Albanian, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, and Japanese. The book revolves around the linked themes of parametric theory and the dynamics of language change. The former is a key element in the search for explanatory adequacy in historical syntax: if the notion of imperfect learning, for example, explains a large element of grammatical change, it is vital to understand how parameters are set in language acquisition and how they might have been set differently in previous generations. The book tests particular hypotheses against data from different times and places with the aim of understanding the relationship between language variation and the dynamics of change. Is it possible, for example, to reconcile the unidirectionality of change predominantly expressed in the phenomenon of ‘grammaticalization’, with the multidirectionality predicted by generativist approaches?