Biolinguistics: Facts, Fiction, and Forecast

Abstract

Biolinguistics, as I understand it, refers to a branch of the cognitive sciences that seeks to uncover the biological underpinnings of the human capacity to support language acquisition (the development of an I-language, where ‘I-’ is meant as ‘internal’, ‘individual’, and ‘intensional’, following Chomsky 1986). That language acquisition requires a (possibly complex and multi-faceted) biological foundation cannot be seriously put into doubt, and biolinguistics, in the wake of early works by Chomsky and Lenneberg, takes that fundamental facet of human biology as its subject matter. In his ‘discussion note’, in which he reviews The Biolinguistic Enterprise, which I co-edited with Anna Maria Di Sciullo (Di Sciullo and Boeckx 2011), Jackendoff (2011) goes through a series of important issues conceding the field, and makes several points worth highlighting, but he also commits several errors worth pointing out. This is the object of the present piece. Specifically, my aim in the pages that follow is to tease apart the real issues (‘fact’), from the rhetoric (‘fiction’) and from the different bets various researchers make concerning the future (‘forecast’). Ray Jackendoff is eminently well placed to speak about biolinguistics, since he has made seminal contributions to the field. Indeed, he is among the most committed theoretical linguists I know when it comes to establishing interdisciplinary bridges (a necessary step towards a productive biolinguistics), and has been for many years before other biolinguists joined forces (witness Jackendoff 1983, 1987, 2007). Given his stature in the field, Jackendoff’s opinion cannot be ignored. Inaccuracies, if any, should be corrected, lest beginning students of the field receive a distorted picture of the enterprise. As the title of his paper indicates, Jackendoff contrasts two views of the language faculty. As he puts it in the abstract, his aim is to “compare the theoretical stance of biolinguistics” with a constraint-based Parallel Architecture of the sort he has been advocating for decades (see the pieces collected in Jackendoff 2010, and especially Jackendoff 1997, 2002, Culicover and Jackendoff 2005). As we will see shortly, however, the contrast between his approach and “biolinguistics” conflates ‘biolinguistics’, ‘minimalism’ and ‘Chomsky’s specific proposals within minimalism and biolinguistics’, which are related, but nonetheless distinct targets.1 This I