This is a repository copy of Formal Syntax and Deep History. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/169292/ Version: Published Version Article: Ceolin, Andrea, Guardiano, Cristina, Irimia, Monica-Alexandrina et al. (1 more author) (2020) Formal Syntax and Deep History. Frontiers in Psychology. 488871. ISSN 1664- 1078 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.488871 Reuse This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This licence allows you to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as you credit the authors for the original work. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing
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[email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 18 December 2020 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.488871 Formal Syntax and Deep History Andrea Ceolin1, Cristina Guardiano2, Monica Alexandrina Irimia2 and Giuseppe Longobardi3* 1 Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States, 2 Dipartimento di Comunicazione ed Economia, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Reggio Emilia, Italy, 3 Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, York, United Kingdom We show that, contrary to long-standing assumptions, syntactic traits, modeled here within the generative biolinguistic framework, provide insights into deep-time language history. To support this claim, we have encoded the diversity of nominal structures using 94 universally definable binary parameters, set in 69 languages spanning across up to 13 traditionally irreducible Eurasian families.