Biolinguistics
Similarly, Lenneberg (1967)[2] formulated the Critical Period Hypothesis, the main idea of which being that language acquisition is biologically constrained.
Darwinism addressed the arguments of other researchers and scholars much as Max Müller by arguing that language use, while requiring a certain mental capacity, also stimulates brain development, enabling long trains of thought and strengthening power.
Darwin drew an extended analogy between the evolution of languages and species, noting in each domain the presence of rudiments, of crossing and blending, and variation, and remarking on how each development gradually through a process of struggle.
During the first phase, work focused on: During this period, the greatest progress was made in coming to a better understanding of the defining properties of human language as a system of cognition.
Three landmark events shaped the modern field of biolinguistics: two important conferences were convened in the 1970s, and a retrospective article was published in 1997 by Lyle Jenkins.
The following year, Juan Uriagereka, a graduate student of Howard Lasnik, wrote the introductory text to Minimalist Syntax, Rhyme and Reason.
While Professor Anna Maria Di Sciullo claims that the interdisciplinary research of biology and linguistics in the 1950s-1960s led to the rise of biolinguistics.
[12] In Aspects of the theory of Syntax, Chomsky proposed that languages are the product of a biologically determined capacity present in all humans, located in the brain.
A great deal of ours must be innate, supporting his claim with the fact that speakers are capable of producing and understanding novel sentences without explicit instructions.
Chomsky proposed that the form of the grammar may emerge from the mental structure afforded by the human brain and argued that formal grammatical categories such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives do not exist.
[14] UG refers to the initial state of the faculty of language; a biologically innate organ that helps the learner make sense of the data and build up an internal grammar.
Individuals are thought to be "wired" with universal grammar rules enabling them to understand and evaluate complex syntactic structures.
As SM and CI are finite, the main function of NS is to make it possible to produce infinite numbers of sound-meaning pairs.
[23] According to the hypothesis being developed, the essential properties of language arise from nature itself: the efficient growth requirement appears everywhere, from the pattern of petals in flowers, leaf arrangements in trees and the spirals of a seashell to the structure of DNA and proportions of human head and body.
Furthermore, the possibility of ternary branching would deviate from the Fibonacci sequence and consequently would not hold as strong support to the relevance of Natural Law in syntax.
This integration of other fields to explain language is recognized as the strong view in biolinguistics[28] While they are obviously essential, and while genomes are associated with specific organisms, genes do not store traits (or "faculties") in the way that linguists—including Chomskyans—sometimes seem to imply.
[29] In biolinguistics, language is recognised to be based on recursive generative procedure that retrieves words from the lexicon and applies them repeatedly to output phrases.
[30][31] This generative procedure was hypothesised to be a result of a minor brain mutation due to evidence that word ordering is limited to externalisation and plays no role in core syntax or semantics.
Recent investigations of displacement concur to a slight rewiring in cortical brain regions that could have occurred historically and perpetuated generative grammar.
The relatively new science of evo-devo that suggests everyone is a common descendant from a single tree has opened pathways into gene and biochemical study.
Recent studies of birds and mice resulted in an emerging consensus that FOXP2 is not a blueprint for internal syntax nor the narrow faculty of language, but rather makes up the regulatory machinery pertaining to the process of externalization.
[32] This has consequences for our understanding of: (i) the origins of the E and L components found in bird and monkey communication systems; (ii) the rapid emergence of human language as related to words; (iii) evidence of hierarchical structure within compound words; (iv) the role of phrases in the detection of the structure building operation Merge; and (v) the application of E and L components to sentences.
Instead, supporters of the Gradualist Approach believe language slowly progressed through a series of stages as a result of a simple combinatory operator that generated flat structures.
Therefore, "roots" form the lexical component of the Integration Hypothesis while grammatical category (noun, verb, adjective) and inflectional properties (e.g. case, number, tense, etc.)
In this proposal of a lexical protolanguage, compounds are developed in the second stage through a combination of single words by a rudimentary recursive n-ary operation that generates flat structures.
This discovery leads to the hypothesis that words, compounds, and all linguistic objects of the human language are derived from this integration system, and provides contradictory evidence to the theory of an existence of a protolanguage.
Therefore, by observing recursion within exocentric VN compounds of Romance languages, this proves that there must be an existence of an internal hierarchical structure which Merge is responsible for combining.
For example, referring to the Italian translation of "rings, earrings, or small jewels holder", [porta[anelli, orecchini o piccoli monili]] lit.
[41] Due to these limitations in each system, where both lexical and expressive categories can only be one layer deep, the recursive and unbounded hierarchical structure of human language is surprising.
Since the early emergence of biolinguistics to its present day, there has been a focused mainly on the weak stream, seeing little difference between the inquiry into generative linguistics and the biological nature of language as well as heavily relying on the Chomskyan origin of the term.
