Thank you for visiting my website. I am a linguist with research interests in syntax, Slavic syntax, and the evolution of syntax. My research focus in the past fifteen years has been understanding how and why human language evolved. My findings lead to the conclusion that syntax/grammar evolved gradually (starting with a simple stage), and that this stage is not only still evident in various modern language constructions (proxies/‘living fossils’), but that it also provides a scaffolding/foundation for building more complex syntactic/grammatical structures, as well as a common denominator for variation across languages.
My most thorough and comprehensive arguments for this position can be found in the two books on the topic: Evolutionary Syntax (2015), Oxford University Press, and A Critical Introduction to Language Evolution (2019 e-book, Springer Expert Briefs). The most succinct proposal (which gives a fragment of early human and Neanderthal grammars) can be found in my 2016 open access article A gradualist scenario for language evolution: A precise reconstruction. Recently (2019) I co-authored an article cross-fertilizing my findings of the relevance of verbal aggression in language evolution with the recent findings in biology that human evolution may have involved self-domestication. Here and here you can find two additional co-authored 2018 articles offering results of fMRI experiments testing some predictions of this proposal. My CV lists most recent articles (2020 and 2021), which are not open access. I have also just published a review about whether syntax was borrowed from toolmaking here.
I invite you to look at my publications on the topic, and to give me feedback (progovacATwayneDOTedu).
