This article presents one side of a long-standing debate in linguistics about whether human languages are more shaped by pressures for efficient communication,

This article presents one side of a long-standing debate in linguistics about whether human languages are more shaped by pressures for efficient communication, or by innate computational constraints that are hardwired in the brain. The latter position is heavily associated with Chomsky’s school, which posits that language can only be understood in terms of complex, discrete data structures and a small set of computational operations acting on them. This article is a fairly standard articulation of that position. Which is to say, it’s not all there is to this debate. For a review of the arguments on the other side (that language is shaped by a pressure for efficient communication) here’s a nice read: http://colala.berkeley.edu/papers/gibson2019how.pdf http://colala.berkeley.edu/papers/gibson2019how.pdf