Biolinguistics最新文献

{"title":"From Wallace’s Problem to Owen’s Solution: A Review of More than Nature Needs by Derek Bickerton","authors":"G. Lorenzo, S. Balari","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9005","url":null,"abstract":"Review of More than Nature Needs by Derek Bickerton","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2014-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075775","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 Bird Is the Word","authors":"Pedro Tiago Martins","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9003","url":null,"abstract":"The idea that birds might have something related to language that humans also seem to have has gone full circle: After the developments of linguistics and psychology during the 20th century put the ‘uniquely human’ in the center stage, with the help of failed or misled language experiments with animals, it now seems that perhaps birds have something to tell us after all. Even though the study of our closest cousins still very much dominates the understanding of our own biological and behavioral traits and tendencies, current, cutting-edge theories of language evolution now give a great deal of importance to the study of birds and their vocal abilities. It is not the case of course that scientists nowadays think that birds have ‘human language’ (they don’t, as the reader will also have concluded, if he has ever been around birds and tried to have a conversation). Instead, what has happened is that recent developments in various fields have made the study of birds a perfectly fine component of any serious approach to","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2014-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71076064","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":"Some Problems for Biolinguistics","authors":"D. Bickerton","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8993","url":null,"abstract":"Biolinguistics will have to face and resolve several problems before it can achieve a pivotal position in the human sciences. Its relationship to the Minimalist Program is ambiguous, creating doubts as to whether it is a genuine subdiscipline or merely another name for a particular linguistic theory. Equally ambiguous is the relationship it assumes between ‘knowledge of language’ and the neural mechanisms that actually construct sentences. The latter issue raises serious questions about the validity of covert syntactic operations. Further problems arise from the attitudes of many biolinguists towards natural selection and evo-devo: The first they misunderstand, the second they both misunderstand and overestimate. One consequence is a one-sided approach to language evolution crucially involving linguistic ‘precursors’ and the protolanguage hypothesis. Most of these problems arise through the identification of biolinguistics with internalist and essentialist approaches to language, thereby simultaneously narrowing its scope and hindering its acceptance by biologists.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2014-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075190","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":"Signs and Offline Brain Systems in Language Evolution","authors":"G. Castillo","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9001","url":null,"abstract":"Denis Bouchard’s book is a refreshingly new take on the old problem of detailing the processes by which humans became linguistic creatures, a puzzle that researchers of varying disciplines have been attempting to solve since long before the inception of modern biolinguistics. It is perhaps not surprising that the book, divided into four parts, starts with several chapters that call to our attention the apparent failure to provide a definite answer to this question. Bouchard argues that, for a start, language cannot be explained scientifically if linguistics receives a treatment or a status that is different from the other sciences, a mistake that he finds evidenced by the scarcity of principled explanations in the literature. A principled explanation is one that considers the object of study as dependent on logically prior elements from which it arises. Since language can be considered as a system that links percepts and concepts, or representations of sound and meaning, the principled elements of language should be those studied by the sciences of meaning and perception. Explaining the evolution of language, in sum, is determining how the systems that produced concepts and percepts changed in the brains of our ancestors so that their products could be linked and become signs. The existence of signs is, therefore, “the only special property of language” (p. 97). Parts II and III of the book, introducing Bouchard’s own Sign Theory of Language (STL), invite us to consider the evolutionary implications of assuming that language is just a system of signs. But first, what is a sign? According to Saussure (1916), a sign can be defined as a relation between a representation of a sound pattern (a signifier, e.g. /dɔg/), and a representation of a chunk of cognition (a signified, e.g. the concept of dog). Two special properties of signs are crucial to understanding their nature: abstraction and arbitrariness. Signs are","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2014-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075745","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":"From Comparative Languistics to Comparative (Bio)linguistics: Reflections on Variation","authors":"Evelina Leivada","doi":"10.5964/bioling.9015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.9015","url":null,"abstract":"In some sense I feel that much (but obviously not all) of current linguistic work displays a relapse to the spirit prevailing in pre-Chomskyan times. Linguistics is about describing language data. Period. Beyond this there is no deeper epistemological goal. Of course, those who became linguists because they like to play around with language data could not care less, because they can pursue their interests under any development of the field, nowadays possibly with less pressure and stress. Personally I felt that much of what I was offered to read in recent years was intolerably boring and that the field of linguistics was becoming increasingly uninteresting and trivialized”. (Felix 2010: 71, emphasis added)","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2014-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075653","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 Structures as Descriptions of Sensorimotor Processes","authors":"A. Knott","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8991","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I propose a hypothesis linking elements of a model of theoretical syntax with neural mechanisms in the domain of sensorimotor processing. The syntactic framework I adopt to express this linking hypothesis is Chomsky’s Minimalism: I propose that the language-independent ’Logical Form’ (LF) of a sentence reporting a concrete episode in the world can be interpreted as a detailed description of the sensorimotor processes involved in apprehending that episode. The hypothesis is motivated by a detailed study of one particular episode, in which an agent grasps a target object. There are striking similarities between the LF structure of transitive sentences describing this episode and the structure of the sensorimotor processes through which it is apprehended by an observer. The neural interpretation of Minimalist LF structure allows it to incorporate insights from empiricist accounts of syntax, relating to sentence processing and to the learning of syntactic constructions.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2014-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075508","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":"Biolinguistics and Platonism: Contradictory or Consilient?","authors":"J. Watumull","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8969","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8969","url":null,"abstract":"It has been argued that language is a Platonic object, and therefore that a biolinguistic ontology is incoherent. In particular, the notion of language as a system of discrete infinity has been argued to be inconsistent with the assumption of a physical (finite) basis for language. These arguments are flawed. Here I demonstrate that biolinguistics and mathematical Platonism are not \u0000mutually exclusive and contradictory, but in fact mutually reinforcing and consilient in a coherent and compelling philosophy of language. This consilience is effected by Turing’s proof of the coherency of a finitely procedure generative of infinite sets.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075104","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":"Biolinguistics: Facts, Fiction, and Forecast","authors":"C. Boeckx","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8981","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8981","url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075579","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":"Is Word Order Asymmetry Mathematically Expressible?","authors":"Koji Arikawa","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8967","url":null,"abstract":"The computational procedure for human natural language (CHL) shows an asymmetry in unmarked orders for S, O, and V. Following Lyle Jenkins, it is speculated that the asymmetry is expressible as a group-theoretical factor (included in Chomsky’s third factor): “[W]ord order types would be the (asymmetric) stable solutions of the symmetric still-to-be-discovered ‘equations’ governing word order distribution”. A possible “symmetric equation” is a linear transformation f(x) = y, where function f is a set of merge operations (transformations) expressed as a set of symmetric transformations of an equilateral triangle, x is the universal base vP input expressed as the identity triangle, and y is a mapped output tree expressed as an output triangle that preserves symmetry. Although the symmetric group S3 of order 3! = 6 is too simple, this very simplicity is the reason that in the present work cost differences are considered among the six symmetric operations of S3. This article attempts to pose a set of feasible questions for future research.","PeriodicalId":54041,"journal":{"name":"Biolinguistics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2013-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71075483","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 Creative Aspect of Language Use and the Implications for Linguistic Science","authors":"Eran Asoulin","doi":"10.5964/bioling.8963","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5964/bioling.8963","url":null,"abstract":"The creative aspect of language use provides a set of phenomena that a science of language must explain. It is the “central fact to which any significant linguistic theory must address itself” and thus “a theory of language that neglects this ‘creative’ aspect is of only marginal interest” (Chomsky 1964: 7–8). Therefore, the form and explanatory depth of linguistic science is restricted in accordance with this aspect of language. In this paper, the implications of the creative aspect of language use for a scientific theory of language will be discussed, noting the possible further implications for a science of the mind. It will be argued that a corollary of the creative aspect of language use is that a science of language can study the mechanisms that make language use possible, but that such a science cannot explain how these mechanisms enter into human action in the form of language use.","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":"71074804","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}