Epilogue, Prologue—or What?

For the last few years I helped organize a group of faculty in my university, all of whom share an interest on the complexity of language from different perspectives. ¹ After several meetings where issues discussed in this book’s introduction were presented, Dan Lathrop—who was beginning to develop a high-performance computational system that I return to, in part inspired by the linguistics being discussed—started speaking of grant applications to explore the neurophysiological conditions under which symbolic dependencies may arise. ² We also teamed up with colleagues at other universities pursuing similar abstract theoretical, experimental, and computational modeling approaches. Since only Jonathan Fritz among us had experience with non-human mammals (most of the others either worked with birds or in modeling), we decided to seek funding that, for the most part, would allow us to work with avian models.