Some biolinguistic remarks

After comments with laudatory and clarifying intent on the Chomskyan revolution, I make some critical remarks on Eörs Szathmáry's views on the evolution of language and its relation to the brain. This is followed by a brief sketch of the theory of one-dimensional syntax in the biolinguistic context, leading to the conclusion that the item-organizing specificity of human language may not be due to a qualitative change in narrow syntactic ability. This unique property may instead be a consequence of the possession of an interpretive module capable of parallel processing of numerous simple one-dimensional syntactic structures – which individually have no more configurational complexity than birdsong.