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Part of
Biolinguistic Investigations on the Language Faculty
Edited by Anna Maria Di Sciullo
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 235] 2016
► pp. vii–xviii

Biolinguistic investigations on the Language Faculty

Introduction

| Université du Québec à Montréal

The papers assembled in this volume aim to contribute to our understanding of the human capacity for language, understood as a generative procedure that relates sounds and meanings via syntax. While theoretical hypotheses about this relation are part of the generative enterprise since its beginnings, recent developments address the issue in terms of the properties of the ‘language organ’. Different hypotheses about the properties of the generative procedure, giving rise to the discrete infinity of language, are under discussion, and their connection with biology is open to important cross-disciplinary work. Advances have been made in human-animal studies to differentiate human language from animal communication. Contributions from neurosciences also point to the exclusive properties of the human brain for language. Studies in genetically based language impairments also contribute to the understanding of the properties of the language organ. This volume brings together contributions on theoretical and experimental investigations on the Language Faculty, language variation and language impairments. The following paragraphs present the gist of their content.

Published online: 24 November 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.235.001int
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