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Biolinguistics: Current State and Future Prospects

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Biolinguistics: Current State and Future Prospects [INVITED ARTICLE] BIOLINGUISTICS: CURRENT STATE AND FUTURE PROSPECTS LYLE JENKINS Biolinguistics Institute The study of the biology of human language, biolinguistics, has been fruitfully investigated over the last sixty years. Many important insights have been gained into the questions of what language is (mechanisms and functions), how language develops (growth of language), and how language evolves in the species. Principles of symmetry have often helped to unify areas of the natural sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology. The application of symmetry to the kinship system of the Warlpiri aborigines of Australia is examined to demonstrate how symmetry illuminates the intersec- tion of language and other cognitive systems.* Keywords: biolinguistics, development, evolution, unification, symmetry 1. Introduction: The Biolinguistic Program Biolinguistics, the study of the biology of human language, investigates the standard fields of inquiry common to all biological disciplines: form/ function, development (in the individual) and evolution (in the species). In the case of language biolinguists investigate the structure, function and use of language, the development of language in the individual and the evolu- tion of language in the species. The following kinds of questions for lan- guage are studied: * I have greatly profited from discussion of these issues over the years with my col- leagues Allan Maxam, Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Noam Chomsky. I am grateful to Professor Yukio Otsu and Professor Koji Fujita for the opportunity to take part at both the Symposium “Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Prospects of Linguistics” and at the Special Workshop on Biolinguistics, as well as to interact with all of the other participants. I would like to thank Secretary-General Nobuaki Nishioka of the English Linguistics Society of Japan very much for the opportunity to participate in the 30th an- niversary of the Society. Last, but not least, I want to express my deep appreciation for the unfailing help and hospitality of the Japanese people, who helped to make my visit a very pleasurable one. English Linguistics 30: 2 (2013) 485–508 －485－ © 2013 by the English Linguistic Society of Japan 486 ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, VOL. 30, NO. 2 (2013) (1) What is knowledge of language? (2) How does language develop in the child? (3) How does language evolve in the species? And, of course, the equivalent kinds of questions about mechanism, devel- opment and evolution can be asked of any biological system, whether it is egg-laying in Aplysia or the waggle dance of the honeybee. These questions for the biology of language were explicitly set out by Chomsky (1976) at a symposium in honor of Eric Lenneberg, one of the early pioneers of biolinguistics and was restated in early work on the mini- malist program (see below) by Chomsky and Lasnik (1995). However, these interesting questions were the focus of discussion much earlier at the inception of modern biolinguistics; for some of this history, see Jenkins (2000), the seminal work on biology and language by Lenneberg (1967) and a recent insightful analysis of Lenneberg’s work by Boeckx and Longa (2011). Of course, Chomsky was only spelling out the research agenda for work on the biology of language (biolinguistics) in terms familiar to every bi- ologist. And this approach was implicitly and explicitly accepted by such biologists as the Nobel laureates, Salvador Luria, François Jacob and Niels Jerne in their discussions of aspects of the nascent biolinguistics program, to which they added their own interesting perspectives. Only in such fields as linguistics and philosophy did biolinguistics generate controversy, with end- less discussions of the so-called “Innateness Hypothesis,” etc. But biolo- gists had difficulty understanding what these discussions were even about, since it was well-understood in that field that all biological systems have a genetic component, including language. Questions (1)–(3) are sometimes referred to as the what and how ques- tions of biolinguistics. There is an additional question, the why question, which is perhaps more difficult to answer, which Chomsky (2004) notes is the question of why the principles of language are what they are. The study of this question is the basis for what has been called the minimal- ist program; see discussion in Chomsky (1995); Boeckx (2011); Di Sciullo et al. (2010); Di Sciullo and Boeckx (2011). One may also ask how the study of language might be integrated into the other natural sciences—what Chomsky (1994) has termed the “unification problem.” Chomsky (2005) has observed that properties of the attained language de- rive from three factors: BIOLINGUISTICS 487 (A) Genetic endowment (B) Experience (or Environment) (C) Principles not specific to the faculty of language Factors (A) Genetic endowment and (B) Experience/Environment are fa- miliar in the popular literature as “Nature” and “Nurture.” Palmer (2004) has illustrated how the above factors can interact in different ways. In the classical mode genotype precedes phenotype, whereas in another mode (ge- netic assimilation), phenotype precedes genotype. Feher et al. (2009) have also demonstrated how a phenotype can emerge as genetics and experience interact over multiple generations in the case of birdsong learning in the ze- bra finch. In a paper on the comparative approach to the study of biology and lan- guage, Hauser et al. (2002) note that it is useful to distinguish the faculty of language in the broad sense and the faculty of language in the narrow sense. When considering some property of language, such as recursion, one should not assume that it is uniquely human until one has looked for that property in a wide variety of species. An example of the application of the comparative method is the investigation of the computational abilities of nonhuman primates by Fitch and Hauser (2004), who tested the abil- ity of cotton-top tamarins, a New World primate species, as well as human controls, to process different kinds of grammars. Furthermore, one should not restrict such studies to animal communication; one must entertain “the hypothesis that recursion evolved to solve other computational problems such as navigation, number quantification, or social relationships,” etc. And before we conclude that such a property is unique to human language, we should look for that property in other cognitive domains; e.g., we might ex- amine and compare the property of recursion in mathematics. But if a module for recursion was co-opted from a navigation system for language or some other system, how would we determine that? One pos- sibility is what Shubin et al. (2009) coined “deep homology.” Shubin et al. (1997) argued that “major innovations (e.g. in appendages) are largely de- rived from pre-existing developmental systems” by modifications of genetic regulatory changes so that “… the evolution of successively derived limb types, from lobopods to insect wings, and from agnathan fins to tetrapod limbs appears to be due, in part, to the successive cooption and redeploy- ment of signals established in primitive metazoans.” Principles in (C) can be non-domain-specific or non-organism-specific principles. Chomsky (2005) suggested such principles as computational efficiency and data analysis. We want to suggest symmetry as a candidate 488 ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, VOL. 30, NO. 2 (2013) for a principle (set of principles) that is both non-domain-specific and non- organism-specific. Similar questions can be asked about any biological sys- tem—icosahedral virus architecture, protein folding, chemotaxis, phyllotaxis, falling cats, cognitive functions, etc. In recent years there has been an explosion of research in a variety of fields (Boeckx and Grohmann (2013) and Hogan (2011)); e.g. studies of sound, structure and meaning in the languages of the world, including uni- versal and comparative grammar, syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology and articulatory and acoustic phonetics, language acquisition and perception, language change (Radford et al. (2009)), studies of genes involved in human language (and other animal systems) (see below), agrammatism (Grodzinsky and Amunts (2006)), neurology of language, including expressive and recep- tive aphasias, imaging and the electrical activity of the brain (Stemmer and Whitaker (2008)), studies of split brain patients (Gazzaniga (2005)), sign language (Brentari (2010)), pidgin and creole languages (Hickey (2010)), language savants (Smith and Tsimpli (1995)), comparative ethology and evo- lution (Christiansen and Kirby (2003)), mathematical modeling and dynami- cal systems (see below), language and mathematics (Dehaene et al. (2007)), etc., to name only a handful. Biolinguistics also studies how the biology of human language relates to other human cognitive systems and to precursors in other species. During and after the Human Genome Project, a number of tools and techniques have been developed to accelerate research of entire genomes as well as to permit the comparative genomic study of human vs. nonhuman primates. These include; e.g. microarray techniques, next-generation sequencing, and Whole Genome Association studies. We are now able to examine and compare brain samples from human and nonhuman primates and ask questions like: what genes and what brain areas contribute to language and cognition? Already a number of genes have been identified that are associated with language and other cognitive functions. Other questions that are being studied are what genes
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