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Description:
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This book, by leading scholars, represents some of the main work in progress
in biolinguistics. It offers fresh perspectives on language evolution and
variation, new developments in theoretical linguistics, and insights on the
relations between variation in language and variation in biology. The authors
address the Darwinian questions on the origin and evolution of language from
a minimalist perspective, and provide elegant solutions to the evolutionary
gap between human language and communication in all other organisms.
They consider language variation in the context of current biological
approaches to species diversity - the 'evo-devo revolution' - which bring to
light deep homologies between organisms. In dispensing with the classical
notion of syntactic parameters, the authors argue that language variation, like
biodiversity, is the result of experience and thus not a part of the language
faculty in the narrow sense. They also examine the nature of this core
language faculty, the primary categories with which it is concerned, the
operations it performs, the syntactic constraints it poses on semantic
interpretation and the role of phases in bridging the gap between brain and
syntax. Written in language accessible to a wide audience, "The Biolinguistic
Enterprise" will appeal to scholars and students of linguistics, cognitive
science, biology, and natural language processing.
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