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Biolinguistics: Forays Into Human Cognitive Biology doi 10.4436/JASS.91009 JASs Invited Reviews Journal of Anthropological Sciences Vol. 91 (2013), pp. 63-89 Biolinguistics: forays into human cognitive biology Cedric Boeckx ICREA (Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies), University of Barcelona, Department of General Linguistics, Gran via de les Cortes Catalanes 585, 08007 Barcelona, Spain e-mail: [email protected] Summary - The present article surveys the field of biolinguistics. It revisits the roots of the field’s core research agenda, then turns to the various factors that led to its recent re-emergence, and finally offers suggestions for future inquiry. The essay also serves to highlight certain conceptual issues that should be addressed if the field is to bear its interdisciplinary fruits. Keywords - Anthropology, Development, Evolution, Genetics, Linguistics, Neuroscience. Introduction The significant change caused by Chomsky’s review was to reorient scientific studies of lan- Biolinguistics refers to a branch of the cogni- guage towards more internalist issues, revolving tive sciences that focuses on uncovering the bio- around the cognitive capacity that human beings logical underpinnings of the human capacity to bring to the task of language acquisition, interpre- acquire at least one natural language. As such, tation, and production—what Chomsky (1965) and despite its name, it departs sharply from the dubbed “linguistic competence”. Chomsky went many subdisciplines of linguistics, which focus on to formulate a set of central, field-defining on how human languages are put to use in various questions, all of which led logically to the realm socio-cultural contexts. That such uses require a of biology, converging with the range of evidence (possibly complex and multi-faceted) biological revealed by Lenneberg (critical period, creoli- foundation cannot be seriously put into doubt, zation, language impairments, etc.) This was and biolinguistics takes that fundamental aspect in fact to be expected, as both Lenneberg and of human biology as its subject matter. Chomsky took as their point of departure the The biolinguistic enterprise grew out of the classic ethology literature (Konrad Lorenz, Niko concerted efforts of several individuals, most nota- Tinbergen, Karl von Frisch, and others), where bly Noam Chomsky and Eric Lenneberg, in the (animal) behavior was studied “biologically”. 1950s to overcome the overwhelmingly behavior- The success of what is often called the “cog- ist framework dominating psychology and lin- nitive revolution” naturally led to the organiza- guistics in the USA at the time. Although the term tion of interdisciplinary meetings, where lin- ‘biolinguistics’ did not emerge in its current sense guists, biologists, neuroscientists, anthropolo- until the 1970s, the roots of biolinguistics are to gists, and experts in other disciplines such as be found in Chomsky’s 1959 review of Skinner’s Artificial Intelligence, convened to shed further book Verbal Behavior, which effectively put an end light on the biological nature and evolution of to the dominance of the behaviorist paradigm in the human language faculty. Historically speak- psychology, and Lenneberg’s comprehensive col- ing, the most prominent of these meetings was lection of evidence in favor of a biological sub- the “Chomsky-Piaget” encounter in Royaumont strate for the uniquely human capacity for lan- in 1975. It was, in fact, during a prequel of guage acquisition, which culminated in his classic this encounter, in Massachusetts in 1974, that 1967 book, “Biological foundations of language”. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (the mastermind the JASs is published by the Istituto Italiano di Antropologia www.isita-org.com 64 Linguistics and human cognitive biology behind this and many subsequent meetings on enterprises, it suffers from the many differences biolinguistics; witness Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980; that exist among perspectives, methodologies, Piattelli-Palmarini et al., 2009) came up with the and even discrepancies in terminology. Too term ‘biolinguistics’. Interestingly for readers of many scholars still put forth rather naive hypoth- this journal, in the transcript of the 1974 meet- eses about language, ignoring the substantial ing to which I have had access, both the terms progress regarding the computational nature of ‘biolinguistics’ and ‘bioanthropology’ were used human language over the past 50 years—a pro- interchangeably to refer to the same enterprise. gress unmatched in the context of cognition It was indeed clear back then, as it is clear now, (with the possible exception of early vision). that, given the centrality of language for modern There is a serious need for linguists to make the human cognition, a field focusing on the biologi- essential aspects of this progress available, in an cal foundations of human language amounts to accessible form, to other fields. To achieve this, it one intent on uncovering what one might call is necessary for linguists to engage substantially “the human mind’s body plan”, which I take to with the biology literature, something which I be the ultimate subject matter of bioanthropol- recognize has not yet happened enough, hence ogy. But while biological anthropology achieved the feeling among some biologists that little has independence from cultural anthropology and been achieved in terms of concrete results in bio- flourished, biolinguistics did not. Biological con- linguistics. The overall message of this review is cerns remained confined to introductory sections that there are grounds for renewed optimism in of linguistics papers, and substantive engagement this area. with the biology literature on the part of linguists remained scarce. This is in part because at the end of the 1970s theoretical linguistics developed Factors that led to the comeback successful models of cross-linguistic comparisons (Chomsky, 1981; Baker, 2001), and biological The return of ‘biolinguistics’ is due to a vari- concerns were relegated to the background. It ety of factors, which I would like to first list and is only recently—about ten years ago—that the then elaborate on in this section. The factors are: term ‘biolinguistics’ resurfaced, and with it, the 1) The progress made possible by the genomic interdisciplinary concerns that were at the heart revolution in genetics, which led to the of the cognitive revolution in the 1950s. discovery of FOXP2, insights into its evo- In this overview article I examine the factors lutionary history, and its interactome (Lai that led to this biolinguistic revival, discuss the et al., 2001; Enard et al., 2002; Konopka et progress made since then, and highlight both al., 2009) and which promises much more prospects and challenges raised by recent studies. in the coming years; Towards the end of the article, I also formulate 2) The rise of a bottom-up perspective in some personal suggestions intended to advance comparative psychology, and its increased the field, incorporating important results from appreciation that the basic building blocks the anthropological sciences that linguists have of cognition might be shared across a wide perhaps not yet assimilated fully. (Readers wish- range of species, in line with Darwin’s no- ing to learn more about the early history of the tion of descent-with-modification (De Waal field succinctly addressed in this introduction & Ferrari, 2010; Hauser et al., 2002), which section are encouraged to consult Jenkins, 2000; opens up the possibility of constructing Boeckx, 2009a; Di Sciullo & Boeckx, 2011; ‘cognitive phylogenies’ (Fitch et al., 2010); Boeckx & Grohmann, 2013.) 3) A reduction of the theoretical machinery I should stress that the field of biolinguistics needed to account for the fundamental is still in its infancy. Although its major goals properties of grammar within linguistics— are clear, like many similar interdisciplinary a theoretical trend known as ‘linguistic C. Boeckx 65 minimalism’ (Chomsky, 1995, 2007a; serve as illustrations of some of the conceptual Boeckx, 2006, 2011d), which renders the barriers faced by biolinguists. study of the language faculty more feasible The first one is that in order to link genes biologically speaking, both in terms of its (‘bio-’) and mind (‘ling’), it is imperative to emergence, as it minimizes the cognitive develop linking hypotheses involving the brain, boundaries across species, and in terms of for there is no direct road from genes to cogni- its neural implementation; tion. As Marcus (2004) aptly put it, “genes build 4) A decidedly pluralist agenda in biology: neural structures, not behavior”. In fairness, ‘evo-devo’ and its ‘extended synthesis’ (Pig- even this statement is too simplistic, as genes do liucci & Müller, 2010), which provides nothing on their own. To get to neural struc- enough theoretical flexibility to handle a tures, epigenetic processes must be taken into complex bio-cognitive object like the hu- account. But Marcus’s assertion certainly goes man language faculty. in the right direction, as it highlights the dis- tance between genes and cognition. And there’s Molecular windows the rub: linguists, and cognitive scientists more The logical deduction that the faculty of lan- generally, still don’t have a good understanding guage is somehow part of our biological endow- of how brain and mind relate to one another. In ment cannot match the excitement of actually recent years, several important reflections have discovering genes more or less directly related to appeared concerning why this is so (Poeppel linguistic behavior. It is for this reason
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