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. By shifting the focus of investigation in linguistics to a comprehensive scheme that embraces natural sciences, it seeks to yield a framework by which we can understand the fundamentals of the faculty of language.

The biolinguistic perspective began to take shape in the mid-twentieth century, among the linguists influenced by the developments in biology and mathematics.Eric Lenneberg’s Biological Foundations of Language remains a basic document of the field. 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.

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. This effort to understand how much of language can be given a principled explanation has resulted in the Minimalist Program. 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 people to combine words into infinite strings. If this is true, then the objective of biolinguists is to find out as much as we can about the principles underlying mental recursion.

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