Biolinguistics最新文献

{"title":"Biolinguistics or Physicolinguistics? Is the Third Factor Helpful or Harmful in Explaining Language?","authors":"S. Johansson","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8965","url":null,"abstract":"Noam Chomsky (2005) proposed that a ‘third factor’, consisting of general principles and natural laws, may explain core properties of language in a principled manner, minimizing the need for either genetic endowment or experience. But the focus on third-factor patterns in much recent bio-linguistic work is misguided for several reasons: First, ‘the’ third factor is a vague and disparate collection of unrelated components, useless as an analytical tool. Second, the vagueness of the third factor, together with the desire for principled explanations, too often leads to sweeping claims, such as syntax “coming for free, directly from physics”, that are unwarranted without a case-by-case causal analysis. Third, attention is diverted away from a proper causal analysis of language as a biological feature. The point with biolinguistics is to acknowledge the language faculty as a biological feature. The best way forward towards an understanding of language is to take the biology connection seriously, instead of dabbling with physics.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Neanderthals between Man and Beast: A Comment on the Comments of Barceló-Coblijn & Benítez-Burraco (2013)","authors":"S. Johansson","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8979","url":null,"abstract":"Neanderthals between Man and Beast : A Comment on the Comments of Barcelo-Coblijn & Benitez-Burraco (2013)","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Disentangling the Neanderthal Net: A Comment on Johansson (2013)","authors":"L. Barceló-Coblijn, A. Benítez‐Burraco","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8977","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8977","url":null,"abstract":"Sverker Johansson provided a very useful piece of work in which he skillfully reviews most aspects and scientific areas that have dealt with the Neanderthal language issue, including (but not limited to) genetics, archaeology, linguistics and modeling. Johansson’s main conclusion is that Homo neanderthalensis had some form of language, at the very least, a proto-language, which he understands as “a system possessing lexical semantics but not syntax” (Johansson 2013: 6). At the same time, he notes that many aspects are still obscure, and that the data reported until now is still not conclusive. In particular, “whether they had syntactic language can be neither confirmed nor refuted” (p. 23). We agree with Johansson when he says that Neanderthals had to count on some form of language. The amount of evidence he has reviewed points in this direction without doubt. We also agree with him in conceding Neanderthals a much more sophisticated capacity for oral production than as sometimes been depicted in the past. Nevertheless, we think that the real, productive debate is whether or not Neanderthals had the same faculty of language that anatomically modern humans (henceforth, AMHs) have. The author distances himself from this debate and, at the end, he does not take a stance. According to Johansson, the main reasons for not taking any clear position in this regard are related to an inherent problem of the sources of evidence and of the methodology:","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Syntactic Theory and the Evolution of Syntax","authors":"B. Clark","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8961","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary work on the evolution of syntax can be roughly divided into two perspectives. The incremental view claims that the evolution of syntax involved multiple stages between the non-combinatorial communication system of our last common ancestor with chimpanzees and modern human syntax. The saltational view claims that syntax was the result of a single evolutionary development. What is the relationship between syntactic theory and these two perspectives? Jackendoff (2010) argues that “[y]our theory of language evolution depends on your theory of language”. For example, he claims that most work within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) is forced to the saltational view. In this paper it is argued that there is not a dependency relation between theories of syntax and theories of syntactic evolution. The parallel architecture (Jackendoff 2002) is consistent with a saltational theory of syntactic evolution. The architecture assumed in most minimalist work is compatible with an incremental theory.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71074697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Statistical Investigation into the Cross-Linguistic Distribution of Mass and Count Nouns: Morphosyntactic and Semantic Perspectives","authors":"Ritwik Kulkarni, Susan Rothstein, A. Treves","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8959","url":null,"abstract":"We collected a database of how 1,434 nouns are used with respect to the mass/count distinction in six languages; additional informants characterized the semantics of the underlying concepts. Results indicate only weak correlations between semantics and syntactic usage. In five out of the six languages, roughly half the nouns in the database are used as pure count nouns in all respects; the other half differ from pure counts over distinct syntactic properties, with fewer nouns differing on more properties, and typically very few at the pure mass end of the spectrum. Such a graded distribution is similar across languages, but syntactic classes do not map onto each other, nor do they reflect, beyond weak correlations, semantic attributes of the concepts. Considerable variability is seen even among speakers of the same language. These findings are in line with the hypo-thesis that much of the mass/count syntax emerges from language- and even speaker-specific grammaticalization.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Review of the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang9)","authors":"C. Coupé, L. Shuai, T. Gong","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8973","url":null,"abstract":"The 1990’s have witnessed a resurrection of an interest in the origins of language (in fact, such an interest had never actually faded). Although pin-pointing the exact triggers behind the initial sparkles is difficult, one may advocate for the integration of a number of scientific advances, including the first computer simulations of the self-organized emergence and convergence of linguistic conventions (Hurford 1989, Steel 1996), the significant progress in the systematic analysis of mtDNA or Y chromosome genetic distributions across the world (Cann et al. 1987, Underhill et al. 2000), the synthesis of the data from genetics, archaeology, and linguistics (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1988, 1992), and many others. In 1996, the first Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang) was held in Edinburgh for the purpose of fostering a dialog between scholars of diverse backgrounds. At the center of discussions — and in opposition to a generativist framework minimizing the value of such an attempt (Chomsky 1972, Berwick 1998) — laid an effort to account for the properties of the faculty of language in light of modern evolutionary theory (Hurford et al. 1998). The 9th Evolang conference (Evolang9), which took place in Kyoto 13–16 March 2012, was once again an opportunity for scholars from a wide range of disciplines to gather and bridge their lines of arguments (McCrohon et al. 2012, Scott-Phillips et al. 2012). Since the origins and evolution of language have long been the research foci in both evolutionary linguistics and biolinguistics, we provide here a review of the variety of reports that was brought forward during Evolang9. Without being able to pay justice to the wide scope of all contributions that were made, we mainly summarize and frame the primary arguments that echoed during the conference, highlight significant evolutions of the field both in terms of methods and content, and present our opinions on future research in this line.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What Connects Biolinguistics and Biosemiotics?","authors":"P. Augustyn","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8957","url":null,"abstract":"This paper reviews the background, fundamental questions, current issues, and goals of the intellectual movements initiated by Noam Chomsky’s biolinguistics and Thomas A. Sebeok’s (1920-2001) biosemiotics. The purpose of this paper is to give a brief history of these movements, to clarify the common objectives and areas of overlap between them, and to address some aspects of focus and terminology that may stand in the way of productive collaboration among the disciplines involved in the biology of language.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Genetic Factors and Normal Variation in the Organization of Language","authors":"R. Hancock, T. Bever","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8971","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay we present two themes. The first is a factual review of the behavioral and neurological differences in language and cognition between people with and without familial left handedness: These differences begin to justify the claim that there is a continuum of how language and cognition are represented in the brain, reflecting a quantitative difference in the role of the right hemisphere, and consequent potential qualitative differences. The second theme involves the implications of this finding. Various cases of rare neurological organization for language have called into question the idea that there is a single form of representation: These include cases of left-hemispherectomy in which the patients with a lone right hemisphere can grow up to be normal linguistically (Curtiss et al. 2001, Devlin et al. 2003) with normal developmental stages (Curtiss & Shaeffer 1997) as well as unique instances such as the infamous formerly hydrocephalic mathematician whose neocortex was a thin layer of tissue lining the skull (Lewin 1980) — clearly the topology and connections of different cortical areas are very different in these cases from the norm. Even classic and recent studies call into question the unique location and function of a linguo-central structure such as Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas (Penfield & Roberts 1959, Bogen & Bogen 1976, Anderson 2010, Rogalsky & Hickok 2011). But people with familial left-handedness comprise 40% of the population, so we cannot consign their unique behavioral and neurological structures to an odd distaff ‘minority’. A profound implication for language of these considerations is the possibility that the existence of language is not causally dependent on any particular unique neurological organization. Rather, especially the sentence construction mechanism of syntax is a computational type that recruits different neurological structures. On this view the possibility for syntax emerges as a function of the availability of propositional relations, combined with an explosive growth in the number of lexical items that can externalize the internally represented categories. The syntactic computational architecture is represented neurologically via cooption and integration of multiple brain regions that are collectively suited to the type of computation that language requires. On this view, there can be significant lability of how language will be represented in an individual’s brain, if there is significant variability in how the computationally relevant areas function or are interconnected.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075158","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Talking Neanderthals: What Do Fossils, Genetics, and Archeology Say?","authors":"S. Johansson","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8955","url":null,"abstract":"Did Neanderthals have language? This issue has been debated back and forth for decades, without resolution. But in recent years new evidence has become available. New fossils and archeological finds cast light on relevant Neanderthal anatomy and behavior. New DNA evidence, both fossil and modern, provides clues both to the relationship between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and to the genetics of language. In this paper, I review and evaluate the available evidence. My conclusion is that the preponderance of the evidence supports the presence of some form of language in Neanderthals.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71074975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Third Factors and the Performance Interface in Language Design","authors":"Andreas Trotzke, M. Bader, L. Frazier","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8953","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8953","url":null,"abstract":"This paper shows that systematic properties of performance systems can play an important role within the biolinguistic perspective on language by providing third-factor explanations for crucial design features of human language. In particular, it is demonstrated that the performance interface in language design contributes to the biolinguistic research program in three ways: (i) it can provide additional support for current views on UG, as shown in the context of complex center-embedding; (ii) it can revise current conceptions of UG by relegating widely assumed grammatical constraints to properties of the performance systems, as pointed out in the context of lin-ear ordering; (iii) it can contribute to explaining heretofore unexplained data that are disallowed by the grammar, but can be explained by systematic properties of the performance systems.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71074775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}