Cedric Boeckx, Reflections on language evolution: From minimalism to pluralism (Conceptual Foundations of Language Science 6). Berlin: Language Science Press, 2021. Pp. 76.

In Reflections on Language Evolution (ROLE), Cedric Boeckx targets ‘Darwin’s problem’, or the problem of how language evolved. He claims natural language syntax evolved gradually, not suddenly. ROLE continues Boeckx’s transition away from generative grammar and toward what he considers ‘pluralism’, implying that the minimalist program is incompatible with inter-disciplinary perspectives. To address Darwin’s problem, Boeckx argues that we need to boil down the bare essentials of linguistics into a format interpretable and usable by other fields. Otherwise, concepts from linguistics ‘won’t get past customs’ (3). The program that ROLE seems most sympathetic to appears to be the work of Simon Kirby and collaborators. The iterated learning paradigm examines artificial grammar processing to unearth generic biases that drive the learning process. Boeckx notes that ‘critics are quick to point out that this line of work implements the cognitive biases by brute force, and does not show how these evolve organically’ (28). He deems this line of criticism ‘unfair’ – yet not inaccurate. Boeckx’s preference is to think of language as ‘a collection of (generic) cognitive biases’ (29). He does not provide much discussion of what these biases are, however: ‘I suspect there are likely to be very many, associated with general notions like memory, attention, salience, etc.’ (29). Boeckx argues that components of language ‘that don’t manipulate (parts of) sentences’ and are fundamentally lower-level computations seem ‘ideally suited for fruitful comparisons’ with other species (3). Boeckx’s previous book was entitled Elementary Syntactic Structures (Boeckx 2014), a reference to Chomsky (1957). His new book is a reference to Chomsky (1975), Reflections on Language. We might expect that his next book will explore ‘Paleoanthropological Aspects of the Theory of Syntax’, although Boeckx never explicitly renounces his earlier minimalist work – but it seems implicit. ROLE provides no motivations for why any specificminimalist analysis of linguistic phenomena should be rejected, which until recently he appears to have endorsed (Murphy 2015). Boeckx seems to agree with generativists on the uniqueness of the core trait (unbounded hierarchical recursion)