The Biolinguistic Enterprise New Perspectives on the Evolution and Nature of the Human Language Faculty

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.

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 Autonoma 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.

1. Introduction: Contours of the Biolinguistic Research Agenda, Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Cedric Boeckx
Part One: Evolution
2. The Biolinguistic Program: The Current State of its Evolution, Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky
3. Some Reflections on Darwin's Problem in the Context of Cartesian Biolinguistics, Cedric Boeckx
4. Syntax Facit Saltum Redux: Biolinguistics and the Leap to Syntax, Robert Berwick
5. A Geneticist's Dream, a Linguist's Nightmare: The Case of FOXP2, Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini and Juan Uriagereka
6. Biolinguistic Investigations: Genetics and Dynamics, Lyle Jenkins
7. "Deep Homology" in the Biology and Evolution of Language, Tecumseh Fitch
Part Two: Variation
8. The Three factors in Evolution and variation, Lyle Jenkins
9. Three Factors in Language Variation, Charles Yang
10. Approaching Parameters from Below, Cedric Boeckx
11. (Bio)linguistic Diversity, Rita Manzini and Leonardo Savoia
12. The Biolinguistic Program and historical Reconstruction, Giuseppe Longobardi and Cristina Guardiano
13. A Biolinguistic Approach to Variation, Anna Maria Di Sciullo
Part Three: Computation
14. Antisymmetry and the Lexicon, Richard Kayne
15. What Kind of Computing Device is the Human Language Faculty?, Howard Lasnik
16. Clauses, Propositions, and Phases, Richard Larson
17. Reflections on the Optimal Solution: On the Syntactic Representation of Indexicality, Alessandra Giorgi
18. Emergence of a Systemic Semantics Through Minimal and underspecified Codes, Wolfram Hinzen
19. Bridging the Gap Between Brain and Syntax. A Case for a Role of the Phonological Loop, Carlo Cecchetto and Costanza Papagno
20. All you Need is Merge: Biology, Computation, and language from the Bottom-up, Robert Berwick
References
Index