I’ll be speaking on “Substance-Free Logical Phonology in Evolutionary Perspective” at the Workshop on Logical Phonology at the CUNY Graduate Center on January 23, 2025. This workshop will be available via Zoom. My abstract is below.

It has been twenty years since the publication of Chomsky’s (2005) ‘Three factors in language design,’ which encouraged research into how human language is shaped by biological, physical, computational, and information structural ‘third factor’ principles, complementing genetics (first factor) and learned experience (second factor). Early research in this vein (e.g., Samuels 2009a,b) sought to build a phonological theory based entirely on the third factor and arrived at a version of substance-free logical phonology (SFLP). I argue that significant recent advances in neuroscience (e.g. Becker et al. 2025), genomics (e.g. Sebastianelli et al. 2024), and animal cognition (e.g. Lameira et al. 2024, Girard-Buttoz et al. 2025) bolster this case, shedding light on how the first and third factors are inextricably intertwined and yielding insights into how SFLP may have emerged in the human evolutionary lineage, remarkably convergently with birdsong (e.g. Samuels 2015, Gattoni & Tosches 2025, Güntürkün et al. 2024).