Functional categories: an evolutionary perspective

Abstract

In this chapter I will focus on the status and origin of functional categories in the languages of the world, and explore various ideas, with reference to proposals by researchers such Bickerton and Jackendoff, concerning three possibilities: (a) that in the course of language evolution, language developed from a functional category-free to a functional category-rich state; (b) that language started out as a system consisting mostly of syntactic patterns and functional categories (albeit of a different nature), and only then acquired a content lexicon. Ultimately, I tentatively propose that neither scenario is the most likely one, but that we need to consider the possibility of co-evolution of the syntactic and the lexical subsystems or modules in language, with functional categories at the interface between the two.