ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the treatment that notions like novelty and variation have received in the linguistic literature, and offers some insights and counter-evidence from evolutionary biology, in favor of a biologically informed study of language. The discussion of the contributions of both genes and developmental processes to the linguistic phenotype is a very interesting endeavor, but, alas, it is rarely pursued in linguistics. One of the most if not the most well-known notions that have emerged from that paper of Hauser is the distinction between the Faculty of Language in the Narrow Sense (FLN) and Faculty of Language in the Broad Sense (FLB). More foundational than the FLN/FLB dihotomy, the distinction between Internal language (I-language) and External language (E-language) is probably the most famous in modern linguistics. I-language refers to the speaker-internal linguistic knowledge that reflects competence in a given language, while E-language refers to the socio-cultural construct, that is, one of the possible materializations of an I-language.
