Information about Biolinguistics
Biolinguistics is the study of the biology and evolution of language. It is a highly interdisciplinary field, including linguists, biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, mathematicians, and others. The biolinguistic perspective began to take shape half a century ago, among the linguists influenced by the developments in biology and mathematics (1). Eric Lenneberg’s Biological Foundations of Language remains a basic document of the field (3). In 1974, the first Biolinguistic conference was organized by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, bringing together evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and others interested in the development of language in the individual, its origins, and evolution (4). The effort to understand how much of language can be given a principled explanation has resulted in the Minimalist Program (2). Biolinguistics, shifting the focus of investigation in linguistics to a comprehensive scheme that embraces natural sciences, promises to yield a framework by which we can understand the fundamentals of the Faculty of Language.
Recent work in theoretical linguistics and cognitive studies at MIT construes human language as a highly non-redundant species-specific system. Noam Chomsky’s latest contribution to the study of the mind in general and language in particular is his minimalist approach to syntactic representations. In syntax, lexical items are merged externally, building argument representations; next, the internal merge induces movement and creates constituent structures where each is part of a larger unit. This mechanism allows us to combine words into infinite strings. If this is true, then our objective is to find out as much as we can about the principles underlying mental recursion.
It is possible that the core principles of the Language Faculty can be explained by the nature’s law (the Fibonacci sequence where each consecutive number is a sum of the two that precede it) (5). According to the hypothesis being developed, the essential properties of language arise from nature itself: the efficient growth requirement appears everywhere, from the pattern of petals in flowers, leaf arrangements in trees and the spirals of a seashell to the structure of DNA and proportions of human head and body. If this law applies to existing systems of cognition, both in humans and non-humans, then what allows our mind to create language? Could it be that a single cycle exists, a unique component of which gives rise to our ability to construct sentences, refer to ourselves and other persons, group objects and establish relations between them, and eventually understand each other? The answer to this question will be a landmark breakthrough, not only within linguistics but in our understanding of cognition in general.
This approach is not without its critics. David Poeppel, the neuroscientist and linguist, has characterized the Biolinguistics program as "inter-disciplinary cross-sterilization", arguing that vague metaphors that seek to relate linguistic phenomena to biological phenomena explains nothing about language or biology.
Recent work in theoretical linguistics and cognitive studies at MIT construes human language as a highly non-redundant species-specific system. Noam Chomsky’s latest contribution to the study of the mind in general and language in particular is his minimalist approach to syntactic representations. In syntax, lexical items are merged externally, building argument representations; next, the internal merge induces movement and creates constituent structures where each is part of a larger unit. This mechanism allows us to combine words into infinite strings. If this is true, then our objective is to find out as much as we can about the principles underlying mental recursion.
It is possible that the core principles of the Language Faculty can be explained by the nature’s law (the Fibonacci sequence where each consecutive number is a sum of the two that precede it) (5). According to the hypothesis being developed, the essential properties of language arise from nature itself: the efficient growth requirement appears everywhere, from the pattern of petals in flowers, leaf arrangements in trees and the spirals of a seashell to the structure of DNA and proportions of human head and body. If this law applies to existing systems of cognition, both in humans and non-humans, then what allows our mind to create language? Could it be that a single cycle exists, a unique component of which gives rise to our ability to construct sentences, refer to ourselves and other persons, group objects and establish relations between them, and eventually understand each other? The answer to this question will be a landmark breakthrough, not only within linguistics but in our understanding of cognition in general.
This approach is not without its critics. David Poeppel, the neuroscientist and linguist, has characterized the Biolinguistics program as "inter-disciplinary cross-sterilization", arguing that vague metaphors that seek to relate linguistic phenomena to biological phenomena explains nothing about language or biology.
People In Biolinguistics
- Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, University of Arizona
- David Poeppel, University of Maryland
- Karin Stromswold, Rutgers University
- W. Tecumseh Fitch, University of St. Andrews
- Marc D. Hauser, Harvard University
- Philip Lieberman, Brown University
- Derek Bickerton, University of Hawaii
- Lyle Jenkins, Biolinguistics Institute
- Kenneth Wexler, MIT
- Ray C. Dougherty, New York University (NYU)
- Alec Marantz, NYU/MIT
References
CONFERENCES- Biolinguistic Investigations Conference, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, February 2007. http://www.biolinguistics.net
- Conference on Biolinguistics: Language Evolution and Variation, Università di Venezia, June 2007. http://www.biolinguistics.uqam.ca
- Chomsky, Noam. 2004. Biolinguistics and the Human Capacity. Lecture delivered at MTA, Budapest, May 17. http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20040517.htm
- Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. MIT Press.
- Lenneberg, Eric. 1967. Biological Foundations of Language. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
- Boeckx, Cedric and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (in print) Language as a natural object, linguistics as a natural science.
- Soschen, Alona. 2006. Natural Law: The Dynamics of Syntactic Representations in the Minimalist Program. DEAL. Linguistics in Potsdam 25. http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/lip/25/LIP25-3soschen.pdf
- Jenkins, Lyle, 1997. "Biolinguistics-Structure, Development and Evolution of Language" http://fccl.ksu.ru/papers/gp008.pdf
In linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar (TGG), is a grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Chomskian tradition.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private, coeducational research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing 32 academic departments,[3]
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Avram Noam Chomsky (Hebrew: אברם נועם חומסקי Yiddish: אברם נועם כאמסקי) (born December 7, 1928) is an American
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Recursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition. The term is also used more generally to describe a process of repeating objects in a self-similar way.
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Fibonacci numbers form a sequence defined by the following recurrence relation:
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University of Arizona (also referred to as UA or U of A) is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States.
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University of Maryland, College Park (also known as UM, UMD, or UMCP) is a public university located in the city of College Park, in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., in the United States.
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Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (also known as Rutgers University), is the largest institution for higher education in the state of New Jersey. The eighth-oldest college established in the United States, Rutgers was originally chartered as Queen's College
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University of St Andrews (Scottish Gaelic: Oilthigh Chill Rìmhinn) is the oldest university in Scotland and third oldest in the English-speaking world, having been founded between 1410 and 1413.
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Marc Hauser (* 25 October 1959) is an ethologist who teaches at the Psychology Department at Harvard University.
He received a BS from Bucknell University and a PhD from UCLA.
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He received a BS from Bucknell University and a PhD from UCLA.
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Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League.
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Philip Lieberman is a linguist at Brown University. Originally trained in phonetics, he wrote a dissertation on intonation. The remainder of his career has focussed on topics in the evolution of spoken language, and particularly the relationship between the evolution of the vocal
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Brown University is a private university located in Providence, Rhode Island. Founded in 1764 as the College of Rhode Island, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in New England and the seventh-oldest in the United States. It is a member of the Ivy League.
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Derek Bickerton (born March 25, 1926) is a linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu. Based on his work in creole languages in Guyana and Hawaii, he has proposed that the features of creole languages provide powerful insights into the development of
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University of Hawaiʻi, formally the University of Hawaiʻi System and popularly known as UH
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Ray C. Dougherty (born 1941) is an American linguist and a member of the Arts and Science faculty at New York University. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from Dartmouth College in the early 1960s and his Ph.
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New York University (NYU) is a private, nonsectarian, coeducational research university in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan.
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Alec Marantz, an American linguist.
Until 2007, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Research Director of KIT/MIT MEG Joint Research Lab.
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Until 2007, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Research Director of KIT/MIT MEG Joint Research Lab.
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