Cedric Boeckx

Anna Maria Di Sciullo

This book, by leading scholars, represents some of the main work in progress in biolinguistics. It offers fresh perspectives on language evolution and variation, new developments in theoretical linguistics, and insights on the relations between variation in language and variation in biology. The authors address the Darwinian questions on the origin and evolution of language from a minimalist perspective, and provide elegant solutions to the evolutionary gap between human language and communication in all other organisms. They consider language variation in the context of current biological approaches to species diversity - the 'evo-devo revolution' - which bring to light deep homologies between organisms. In dispensing with the classical notion of syntactic parameters, the authors argue that language variation, like biodiversity, is the result of experience and thus not a part of the language faculty in the narrow sense. They also examine the nature of this core language faculty, the primary categories with which it is concerned, the operations it performs, the syntactic constraints it poses on semantic interpretation and the role of phases in bridging the gap between brain and syntax. Written in language accessible to a wide audience, The Biolinguistic Enterprise will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive science, biology, and natural language processing.

New Perspectives on the Evolution and Nature of the Human Language Faculty

The Biolinguistic Enterprise

In this groundbreaking monograph, Anna Maria Di Sciullo proposes that asymmetry—the irreversibility of a pair of elements in an ordered set—is a hard-wired property of morphological relations. Her argument that asymmetry is central in derivational morphology, would, if true, make morphological objects regular objects of grammar just as syntactic and phonological objects are. This contrasts with the traditional assumption that morphology is irregular and thus not subject to the basic hard-wired regularities of form and interpretation. Di Sciullo argues that the asymmetric property of morphological relations is part of the language faculty. She proposes a theory of grammar, Asymmetry Theory, according to which generic operations have specific instantiations in parallel derivations of the computational space. She posits that morphological and syntactic relations share a property, asymmetry, but diverge with respect to other properties of their primitives, operations, and interface representations. Di Sciullo offers empirical support for her theory with examples from a variety of languages, including English, Modern Greek, African, Romance, Turkish, and Slavic.

Asymmetry in Morphology

Asymmetry in Grammar: Morphology, Phonology and Acquisition presents evidence that asymmetry, as a property of linguistic relations, is salient in grammar. The papers in morphology bring further evidence for the centrality of asymmetry in word-structure. It is shown that asymmetry is part of the internal structure of functional constructs such as determiners and complementizers, as it is the case for lexical constructs. Further evidence is presented for the asymmetry of prefixes in verb structure. A typology of formal objects based on the distinction between maximal and minimal categories is formulated. It is proposed that Formal Complexity drives the change from synthetic to analytic expressions. The papers in phonology point to the fact that asymmetry is part of that linguistic dimension in terms of processes that eliminates symmetric relations, in terms of head-dependency relations, in terms of relative scope of the distinctive features in any inventory, in terms of universal principles in combination with certain language specific choices. Moreover, the papers on acquisition bring to fore experimental data that point to the same direction. The asymmetry of grammatical relations provides the form of the initial state of language that enables the child to cope with the poverty of the stimulus. The collection includes papers in morphology by Anna Maria Di Sciullo, Angela Ralli, Réjean Canac-Marquis, Abdelkader Fassi Fehri, papers in phonology by Eric Raimy, Harry van der Hulst and Nancy Ritter, Glyne Piggott, Charles Reiss, Elan Dresher, and papers in acquisition from Maria Louisa Rivero and Magdalena Goledzinowska, and David Lebeaux.

Volume 2: Morphology, phonology, acquisition

Asymmetry in Grammar

This book explores the interaction of the grammar with the external systems, conceptual-intentional and sensori-motor. The papers in the Language section include configurational analyses of the interface properties of depictives, clitic clusters, imperatives, conditionals, clefts, as well as asymmetries in the structure of syllables and feet. The Brain section discusses questions related to human learning and comprehension of language: the acquisition of compounds, the acquisition of the definite article, the subject/object asymmetry in the comprehension of D-Linked vs. non D-linked questions, the evidence for syntactic asymmetries in American Sign Language, the acquisition of syllable types, and the role of stress shift in the determination of phrase ending. The papers in the Computation section present different perspectives on how the properties of UG can be implemented in a parser; implementations of different theories including configurational selection, incorporation, and minimalism; and the role of statistical and quantitative approaches in natural language processing.

Anna Maria Di Sciullo

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