User:Biolinguist

Biolinguistics

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. 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. However, it was recently shown that syntactic structures possess the properties of other biological systems (see references). The Law of Nature (Golden Ratio) accounts for the number of nodes in syntactic trees, binarity of branching, and syntactic phase formation. This is not to deny the fact that language - and the human cognitive system in general - are governed by unique principles that cannot be found anywhere else.