Abstract

The frame/content theory justifiably makes tinkering an important explanatory principle. However, tinkering is linked to the accidental and, if completely decoupled from functional constraints, it could potentially play the role of an “idiosyncracy generator,” thus offering a sort of “evolutionary” alibi for the Chomskyan paradigm – the approach to language that MacNeilage most emphatically rejects. To block that line of reasoning, it should be made clear that evolutionary opportunism always operates within the constraints of selection