ABSTRACT

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.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at https://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license. 

chapter 1|6 pages

Introduction

The biolinguistic program: a new beginning

part I|60 pages

Computational issues

part II|72 pages

Development, processing and variations

chapter 5|14 pages

Structure dependence in child English

New evidence*

chapter 8|11 pages

Eliminating parameters from the narrow syntax

Rule ordering variation by third-factor underspecification*

part IV|28 pages

Evolutionary considerations

part V|58 pages

Topics in neurobiology

chapter 14|13 pages

Syntax in the brain*

chapter 16|17 pages

A biolinguistic approach to language disorders

Towards a paradigm shift in clinical linguistics