This book, by leading scholars, represents some of the main work in progress in biolinguistics. It offers fresh perspectives on language evolution and variation, new developments in theoretical linguistics, and insights on the relations between variation in language and variation in biology. The
authors address the Darwinian questions on the origin and evolution of language from a minimalist perspective, and provide elegant solutions to the evolutionary gap between human language and communication in all other organisms. They consider language variation in the context of current biological
approaches to species diversity - the 'evo-devo revolution' - which bring to light deep homologies between organisms. In dispensing with the classical notion of syntactic parameters, the authors argue that language variation, like biodiversity, is the result of experience and thus not a part of the
language faculty in the narrow sense.
They also examine the nature of this core language faculty, the primary categories with which it is concerned, the operations it performs, the syntactic constraints it poses on semantic interpretation and the role of phases in bridging the gap
between brain and syntax. Written in language accessible to a wide audience, The Biolinguistic Enterprise will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive science, biology, and natural language processing.
1. Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Cedric Boeckx: Introduction: Contours of the Biolinguistic Research Agenda
Part One: Evolution
2. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky: The Biolinguistic Program: The Current State of its Evolution
3. Cedric Boeckx: Some Reflections on Darwin's Problem
in the Context of Cartesian Biolinguistics
4. Robert Berwick: Syntax Facit Saltum Redux: Biolinguistics and the Leap to Syntax
5. Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini and Juan Uriagereka: A Geneticist's Dream, a Linguist's Nightmare: The Case of FOXP2
6. Lyle Jenkins: Biolinguistic Investigations:
Genetics and Dynamics
7. Tecumseh Fitch: "Deep Homology" in the Biology and Evolution of Language
Part Two: Variation
8. Lyle Jenkins: The Three factors in Evolution and variation
9. Charles Yang: Three Factors in Language Variation
10. Cedric Boeckx: Approaching
Parameters from Below
11. Rita Manzini and Leonardo Savoia: (Bio)linguistic Diversity
12. Giuseppe Longobardi and Cristina Guardiano: The Biolinguistic Program and historical Reconstruction
13. Anna Maria Di Sciullo: A Biolinguistic Approach to Variation
Part Three:
Computation
14. Richard Kayne: Antisymmetry and the Lexicon
15. Howard Lasnik: What Kind of Computing Device is the Human Language Faculty?
16. Richard Larson: Clauses, Propositions, and Phases
17. Alessandra Giorgi: Reflections on the Optimal Solution: On the Syntactic
Representation of Indexicality
18. Wolfram Hinzen: Emergence of a Systemic Semantics Through Minimal and underspecified Codes
19. Carlo Cecchetto and Costanza Papagno: Bridging the Gap Between Brain and Syntax. A Case for a Role of the Phonological Loop
20. Robert Berwick: All you Need
is Merge: Biology, Computation, and language from the Bottom-up
References
Index
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Anna Maria Di Sciullo is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Quebec in Montreal and the director of the Major Collaborative Research Initiative on Interface Asymmetries. She held visiting positions at MIT and at the University of Venice. She is the author of Asymmetry in Morphology
(2005), UG and External Systems (2005), Asymmetry in Grammar (2003), Projections and Interface Conditions: Essays on Modularity (1997), and co-authored with Edwin Williams On the Definition of Word (1987). She is the founder of the International Network on Biolinguistics.
Cedric Boeckx is
Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), and a member of the Center for Theoretical Linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Most recently he was Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He is the author of Islands and Chains (2003),
Linguistic Minimalism (2006), Understanding Minimalist Syntax (2007), Bare Syntax (2008), and Language in Cognition (2009); and the founding co-editor, with Kleanthes K. Grohmann, of the Open Access journal Biolinguistics.
Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin
