Fujita Koji, Boeckx Cedric A. (Editors). Advances in Biolinguistics: The Human Language Faculty and Its Biological Basis

Routledge, 2016. — ix, 276 pages. — ISBN: 978-1-138-89172-2; ISBN: 978-1-315-70952-9.Biolinguistics is a highly interdisciplinary field that seeks the rapprochement between linguistics and biology. Linking theoretical linguistics, theoretical biology, genetics, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, this book offers a collection of chapters situating the enterprise conceptually, highlighting both the promises and challenges of the field, and chapters focusing on the challenges and prospects of taking interdisciplinarity seriously. It provides concrete illustrations of some of the cutting-edge research in biolinguistics and piques the interest of undergraduate students looking for a field to major in and inspires graduate students on possible research directions. It is also meant to show to specialists in adjacent fields how a particular strand of theoretical linguistics relates to their concerns, and in so doing, the book intends to foster collaboration across disciplines.Introduction: the biolinguistic program: a new beginning
Computational issues
Feature-equilibria in syntax
On the primitive operations of syntax
Case and predicate-argument relations
Development, processing and variations
Structure dependence in child English: new evidence
Make a good prediction or get ready for a locality penalty: maybe it’s coming late
Some things to learn from the intersection between language and working memory
Eliminating parameters from the narrow syntax: rule ordering variation by third-factor underspecification
Conceptual and methodological foundations
On certain fallacies in evolutionary linguistics and how one can eliminate them
Biological pluralism in service of biolinguistics
On the current status of biolinguistics as a biological science
Evolutionary considerations
Proposing the hypothesis of an earlier emergence of the human language faculty
Two aspects of syntactic evolution
Topics in neurobiology
Syntax in the brain
The central role of the thalamus in language and cognition
A biolinguistic approach to language disorders: towards a paradigm shift in clinical linguistics