The Biolinguistic Enterprise

Anna Maria Di Sciullo is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Quebec in Montreal and the director of the Major Collaborative Research Initiative on Interface Asymmetries. She held visiting positions at MIT and at the University of Venice. She is the author of Asymmetry in Morphology (2005), UG and External Systems (2005), Asymmetry in Grammar (2003), Projections and Interface Conditions: Essays on Modularity (1997), and co-authored with Edwin Williams On the Definition of Word (1987). She is the founder of the International Network on Biolinguistics.Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), and a member of the Center for Theoretical Linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Most recently he was Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He is the author of Islands and Chains (2003), Linguistic Minimalism (2006), Understanding Minimalist Syntax (2007), Bare Syntax (2008), and Language in Cognition (2009); and the founding co-editor, with Kleanthes K. Grohmann, of the Open Access journal Biolinguistics.

• 1. Introduction: Contours of the Biolinguistic Research Agenda ; PART ONE: EVOLUTION ; 2. The Biolinguistic Program: The Current State of its Evolution ; 3. Some Reflections on Darwin's Problem in the Context of Cartesian Biolinguistics ; 4. Syntax Facit Saltum Redux: Biolinguistics and the Leap to Syntax ; 5. A Geneticist's Dream, a Linguist's Nightmare: The Case of FOXP2 ; 6. Biolinguistic Investigations: Genetics and Dynamics ; 7. "Deep Homology" in the Biology and Evolution of Language ; PART TWO: VARIATION ; 8. The Three factors in Evolution and variation ; 9. Three Factors in Language Variation ; 10. Approaching Parameters from Below ; 11. (Bio)linguistic Diversity ; 12. The Biolinguistic Program and historical Reconstruction ; 13. A Biolinguistic Approach to Variation ; PART THREE: COMPUTATION ; 14. Antisymmetry and the Lexicon ; 15. What Kind of Computing Device is the Human Language Faculty? ; 16. Clauses, Propositions, and Phases ; 17. Reflections on the Optimal Solution: On the Syntactic Representation of Indexicality ; 18. Emergence of a Systemic Semantics Through Minimal and underspecified Codes ; 19. Bridging the Gap Between Brain and Syntax. A Case for a Role of the Phonological Loop ; 20. All you Need is Merge: Biology, Computation, and language from the Bottom-up ; References ; Index

Overall, the quality of work is high. ... The collection reveals connections across projects and shows how research from different fields substantiates the idea that human language is - and is to be studied as - a biological phenomenon.