Introducing Special Issues in Biolinguistics
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EDITORIAL Introducing Special Issues in Biolinguistics Kleanthes K. Grohmann & Cedric Boeckx It is our pleasure to introduce a new ‘feature’ in Biolinguistics: the special issue. Other than the big inaugural issue (Biolinguistics 1, as representative of the entire year’s volume, published in December 2007), it is the set goal of this journal to appear four times per year, roughly as the Winter issue 1 (at the latest at the end of March), the Spring issue 2 (by the end of June), the Summer issue 3 (by the end of September), and the Fall issue 4 (by the end of December). While we will make all possible efforts to bring these issues out just a little earlier than our own set ‘deadline’, the present issue should welcome you right on the mark: Biolinguistics 3.2–3 stands for the Spring/Summer double issue, and thus falls on the right edge of the set dates! The present double issue is a themed, guest-edited special issue, so we will spell out a few general, and then some more specific, points on this new feature. This double issue is a carefully selected sub-set of presentations given at a conference, and this is certainly one possibility for Biolinguistics special issues. As such, we appeal to all interested conference organizers to bear this in mind and get in touch with us for future collaboration. However, we will not publish more than one such special issue per volume, which means that in the future, we will be even more selective. Other potential special issues could be themed indepen- dently of relevant conferences, ideally through a call for papers. Topics should be in line with the general aims of the journal (see also Boeckx & Grohmann 2007) and might range from biolinguistic explanations in linguistic theory to evolution of/in language to genetic aspects of language, and many more. Again, we urge potential guest editors to contact us well in advance. Whatever the background of a special issue, we will impose the usual selection criteria of Biolinguistics. This means that all submitted manuscripts will be peer-reviewed by (at least) two external referees. Our experience assembling the present special issue leads us to announce from the outset that future guest editors will also be asked to get a little bit more involved in the selection and editing process. We will communicate our policy on special issues to interested colleagues on request, of course, which includes setting a strict timeline in order for forthcoming issues to be planned ahead accordingly. To introduce the present issue, we are extremely happy that the organizers of BALE 2008, the conference held at the University of York in July 2008 with the full title Biolinguistics, Acquisition and Language Evolution (at the time of writing, still available under http://www.york.ac.uk/conferences/bale2008/index.html), identified Biolinguistics as the right kind of platform to share the results of this sti- mulating event with the larger community. When we accepted our participation, Biolinguistics 3.2–3: 124–125, 2009 ISSN 1450–3417 http://www.biolinguistics.eu Biolinguistics Editorial 125 thereby introducing the first set of ground rules for Biolinguistics special issues, we made clear to the (then) York co-organizer, Nanna Haug Hilton, who became the special issue’s guest editor (see her Guest Editorial on the next two pages) that we do expect high-quality submissions. In other words, even though a themed special issue may originate in a conference, this is no excuse to publish anything for the sake of publishing. We thus distance ourselves from the term ‘conference proceedings’ — at least, without the modifier ‘highly selective’. In this case (and we see no reason for not doing so in the future), all manuscripts were sent to two anonymous reviewers with full disclosure of the purpose (i.e. a special issue from a conference) — and thus authorship (after all, the conference information is public, so it would be easy for any potential reviewer to extract this kind of information anyway). As a result, several submissions had to be rejected and we are pleased to see the current selection in print. If readers still take issue with (parts of) this selection, we would like to encourage everyone, as with anything else published in Biolinguistics, to submit commentary and criticism in the form of Forum contributions, if not full-fledged articles. With all of this out of the way, please enjoy this Biolinguistics special issue, generate ideas for future (special) issues, and check regularly the journal website at http://www.biolinguistics.eu for news and updates! References Boeckx, Cedric & Kleanthes K. Grohmann. 2007. The Biolinguistics manifesto. Biolinguistics 1, 1–8. Kleanthes K. Grohmann Cedric Boeckx University of Cyprus ICREA & Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Department of English Studies Departament de Filologia Catalana P.O. Box 2053 7Edifici B, Campus UAB 1678 Nicosia 08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona) Cyprus Spain [email protected] [email protected] EDITORIAL Guest Editorial: Introduction to BALE 2008 Nanna Haug Hilton The papers selected to appear in this volume of Biolinguistics were first presented at a conference held at the University of York in July 2008: Biolinguistics, Acquisition and Language Evolution (BALE 2008). BALE 2008 was a small but successful meeting that happened as a joint effort of the post-graduate research students in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. BALE 2008 came about in the autumn of 2007, when we, 14 post-graduate students, were granted money from the university to organize a linguistics conference. The research interests and backgrounds of us doctoral students on the committee varied across a number of linguistic sub-disciplines. It soon became apparent, therefore, that finding a topic for the conference could prove problematic. After some debate, we concluded that instead of addressing a subject that a few of the students specialized in, the conference theme should be one that unites different linguistic disciplines. The topic that emerged deals with a question that, in our opinion, is at the core of all linguistic research: What are the biological underpinnings of language, and what is the interaction between the innate knowledge of linguistic structure with the language input to which we are exposed? Thus, a main goal of BALE 2008 was to be an interdisciplinary meeting, something we think is reflected by the diversity of papers selected for this issue. For the conference, we welcomed research papers that would lead to a wider understanding of the unique language ability of human beings. This meant that we accepted papers that were primarily based in linguistic research but that also tied its findings to other fields like anthropology, evolutionary biology, psycho- logy, genetics, and computational modeling. This way, we hoped to present a conference dealing not only with the nature of our genetic endowment for language, but also the acquisition of language, the neurological and biological underpinnings of language, and the cultural and historical perspectives on evolution of language. We are very grateful to our excellent plenary speakers at BALE 2008 who showcased this multidisciplinarity in their papers: Koji Fujita, Jim Hurford, Simon Kirby, and Juan Uriagereka. The conference would not have come about without the enthusiastic help from the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York, and our thanks are directed, in particular, to Marilyn Vihman and George Tsoulas, who helped make BALE 2008 such a success. Neither would BALE 2008 have originated without the financial support from the University of York, which we are grateful for. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the initial paper selection for the conference, and Kleanthes Grohmann and Cedric Biolinguistics 3.2–3: 126–127, 2009 ISSN 1450–3417 http://www.biolinguistics.eu Biolinguistics Editorial 127 Boeckx for their editorial efforts in publishing the selection of papers here in this special issue of Biolinguistics. Finally, our heartfelt thanks go out to the presenters and attendees of BALE 2008 for making those three days in July 2008 such a memorable conference for us. On behalf of the other committee members for BALE 2008: Suzanne Bardeas, Maryam Gholizadeh, Phil Harrison, Alan Hsieh, Marianna Kaimaki, Koji Kawahara, Kaj Nyman, Jillian Oddie, Daniel Redinger, Rein Ove Sikveland, James Strang, Norman Yeo, and Xinfeng Zhang. Nanna Haug Hilton Rijksuniversiteit Groningen Centre for Language and Cognition Groningen Scandinavian Studies Postbus 716 Groningen 9700 AS The Netherlands [email protected] A Prospect for Evolutionary Adequacy: Merge and the Evolution and Development of Human Language Koji Fujita Biolinguistic minimalism seeks a deeper explanation of the design, develop- ment and evolution of human language by reducing its core domain to the bare minimum including the set-formation operation Merge. In an attempt to open an avenue of research that may lead to an evolutionarily adequate theory of language, this article makes the following proposals: (i) Merge is the elementary combinatorial device that requires no more decomposition; (ii) the precursor to Merge may be found in the uniquely human capacity for hierarchical object manipulation; (iii) the uniqueness of the human lexicon may also be captured in terms of Merge. Empirical validations of these pro- posals should constitute one major topic for the biolinguistic program. Keywords: action grammar; anti-lexicalism;