History - William Caxton. EvoLang coverage: Boeckx on integrating biolingustics and cultural evolution | Replicated Typo. Cedric Boeckx gave a remarkable plenary which tried to pull together the fields of cultural language evolution and biolinguistics, with surprising concessions on either side. Boeckx started from a relatively uncontroversial part of Chomsky’s claim: That aspects of language can be studied scientifically as part of biology. However, Boeckx noted that Luria in 1976 was confident that ‘within a few years’ linguists would be interfacing with and contributing to findings from biology.
However, formal syntax has failed to carry out the biological commitment, and Boeckx wonders why linguists don’t have more to say about, for instance, the recent developments in the study of FOXP2. Boeckx outlined his own position as minimalist, in the sense that a fully specified UG is not plausible. We need to realise that biology is complex, and move beyond the classical model of Broca and Wernicke’s area as dedicated centers of language. Like this: Like Loading... HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE 2 English Goes Underground doc series. On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy - Merritt Ruhlen. BBC Documentary English Birth of a Language. Before babel: in search of the first language.
Greenberg Ruhlen. Don Ringe Home Page. HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE 2 English Goes Underground doc series. Don Ringe on Indo-European.