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This book explores the consequences of Noam Chomsky’s conjecture that head movement is not part of the narrow syntax, the computational system which relates the lexicon to the interfaces. Unlike other treatments of the subject that discard the concept entirely, it retains the core intuition behind head movement and examines the extent to which it can be reformulated and rethought. The book argues that the current conception of syntax must accommodate a species of head movement, although this operation differs somewhat in technical detail and in empirical coverage from earlier understandings of it. It proposes that head movement is part of the narrow syntax and that it applies where the goal of an Agree relation is defective, in a sense that it defines, contending that the theoretical status of head movement is very similar—in fact identical in various ways—to that of XP-movement. Thus head movement, like XP-movement, should be regarded as part of narrow syntax exactly to the extent that XP movement should be. If one aspect of minimalist theorizing is to eliminate unnecessary distinctions, then the book’s argument can be seen as eliminating the distinction between “heads” and “phrases” in relation to internal merge (and therefore reducing the distinctions currently made between internal and external merge).

This book tells the story of an encounter between two cultures: Contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences. The study of language within a biological context has been ongoing for more than fifty years. The development of neuroimaging technology offers new opportunities to enrich the “biolinguistic perspective” and extend it beyond an abstract framework for inquiry. As a theoretical linguist in the generative tradition and also a cognitive scientist schooled in the new imaging technology, the author is equipped to explore this. He examines what he calls the “hidden” revolution in contemporary science: The discovery that the number of possible grammars is not infinite and that their number is biologically limited. This radical but little-discussed change in the way we look at language, the author claims, will require us to rethink not just the fundamentals of linguistics and neurosciences but also our view of the human mind. He searches for neurobiological correlates of “the boundaries of Babel”—the constraints on the apparent chaotic variation in human languages—by using an original experimental design based on artificial languages. The author offers a critical overview of some of the fundamental results from linguistics over the last fifty years, in particular regarding syntax, then uses these essential aspects of language to examine two neuroimaging experiments in which he took part. He describes the two neuroimaging techniques used (positron emission topography and functional magnetic resonance imaging), but makes it clear that techniques and machines do not provide interesting data without a sound theoretical framework.

This book, which offers a theory of human communication that is both formalized through logic and empirically validated through experimental data and clinical studies, argues that communication is a cooperative activity in which two or more agents together, consciously and intentionally, construct the meaning of their interaction. In true communication (which the book distinguishes from the mere transmission of information), all the actors must share a set of mental states. The book takes a cognitive perspective, investigating communication not from the viewpoint of an external observer (as is the practice in linguistics and the philosophy of language) but from within the mind of the individual. It examines communicative interaction through the notion of behavior and dialogue games, which structure both the generation and the comprehension of the communication act (either language or gesture). The book describes both standard communication and nonstandard communication (which includes deception, irony, and “as-if” statements). Failures are analyzed in detail, with possible solutions explained. The book investigates communicative competence in both evolutionary and developmental terms, tracing its emergence from hominids to homo sapiens and defining the stages of its development in humans from birth to adulthood. It correlates this theory with the neurosciences, and explains the decay of communication that occurs both with different types of brain injury and with Alzheimer’s disease.

Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through processes of cultural evolution. Christiansen and Chater propose a revolutionary new framework for understanding the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, offering an integrated theory of how language creation is intertwined across these multiple timescales. Christiansen and Chater argue that mainstream generative approaches to language do not provide compelling accounts of language evolution, acquisition, and processing. Their own account draws on important developments from across the language sciences, including statistical natural language processing, learnability theory, computational modeling, and psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults. Christiansen and Chater also consider some of the major implications of their theoretical approach for our understanding of how language works, offering alternative accounts of specific aspects of language, including the structure of the vocabulary, the importance of experience in language processing, and the nature of recursive linguistic structure.

Understanding the nature and the structure of human language coincides with capturing the constraints which make a conceivable language possible or, equivalently, with discovering whether there can be any impossible languages at all. This book explores these related issues, paralleling the effort of a biologist who attempts at describing the class of impossible animals. In biology, one can appeal for example to physical laws of nature (such as entropy or gravity) but when it comes to language the path becomes intricate and difficult for the physical laws cannot be exploited. In linguistics, in fact, there are two distinct empirical domains to explore: on the one hand, the formal domain of syntax, where different languages are compared trying to understand how much they can differ; on the other, the neurobiological domain, where the flow of information through the complex neural networks and the electric code exploited by neurons is uncovered and measured. By referring to the most advanced experiments in Neurolinguistics the book in fact offers an updated descriptions of modern linguistics and allows the reader to formulate new and surprising questions. Moreover, since syntax - the capacity to generate novel structures (sentences) by recombining a finite set of elements (words) - is the fingerprint of all and only human languages this books ultimately deals with the fundamental questions which characterize the search for our origins.

This concise work offers a compositional theory of verbal argument structure in natural languages that focuses on how arguments which are not “core” arguments of the verb (arguments that are not introduced by verbal roots themselves) are introduced into argument structures. It shows that the type of argument structure variation which allows additional noncore arguments is a pervasive property of human language and that most languages have verbs which exhibit this behavior. It would be natural to hypothesize that the grammatical elements which allow for this variation are the same in different languages, but the author, citing the differences between the inventories of verbs that allow additional arguments in English and Venda, shows the difficulties in this assumption. Either the noncore arguments are introduced by different elements with different distributions, she argues, or the introducing elements are the same and some other factor is responsible for the distributional difference. Distinguishing between these two types of explanation and articulating the properties of argument-introducing elements is the essence of the author’s theory. Investigating the grammatical elements which allow the addition of noncore arguments, she argues that the introduction of additional arguments is largely carried by seven functional heads. Following Chomsky, the author claims that these belong to a universal inventory of functional elements from which a particular language must make its selection. Cross-linguistic variation, she argues, has two sources: Selection; and the way a language packages the selected elements into syntactic heads.

This book offers a new account of meaning for natural language. It argues that equilibrium, or balance among multiple interacting forces, is a key attribute of language and meaning, and shows how to derive the meaning of an utterance from first principles by modeling it as a system of interdependent games. The author’s account results in a novel view of semantics and pragmatics, and describes how both may be integrated with syntax. It considers many aspects of meaning—including literal meaning and implicature—and advances a detailed theory of definite descriptions as an application of the framework.

Linguists have mapped the topography of language behavior in many languages in intricate detail. To understand how the brain supports language function, however, we must take into account the principles and regularities of neural function. Mechanisms of neurolinguistic function cannot be inferred solely from observations of normal and impaired language. This book develops a neurologically plausible theory of grammatic function. It brings together principles of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and parallel distributed processing and draws on literature on language function from cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and functional imaging to develop a comprehensive neurally based theory of language function. The author reviews the aphasia literature, including cross-linguistic aphasia research, to test the model’s ability to account for the findings of these empirical studies. He finds that the model readily accounts for a crucial finding in cross-linguistic studies—that the most powerful determinant of patterns of language breakdown in aphasia is the predisorder language spoken by the subject—and that it does so by conceptualizing grammatic function in terms of the statistical regularities of particular languages which are encoded in network connectivity. The author shows that the model provides a surprisingly good account for many findings and offers solutions for a number of controversial problems. Moreover, aphasia studies provide the basis for elaborating the model in interesting and important ways.

This book brings together contributions by prominent researchers in the fields of language processing and language acquisition on topics of common interest: how people refer to objects in the world, how people comprehend such referential expressions, and how children acquire the ability to refer and to understand reference. The chapters first discuss issues related to children’s acquisition and processing of reference, then consider evidence of adults’ processing of reference from eye-tracking methods (the visual-world paradigm) and from corpora and reading experiments. They go on to discuss such topics as how children resolve ambiguity, children’s difficulty in understanding coreference, the use of eye movements to physical objects to measure the accessibility of different referents, the uses of probabilistic and pragmatic information in language comprehension, antecedent accessibility and salience in reference, and neuropsychological data from the event-related potential recording literature.

A linguistic/cognitive system of “targeting” is proposed that unifies the traditionally distinct domains of anaphora and deixis. As a speaker communicates with a hearer, her attention can come to be on something in the environment — her “target” — that she wants the hearer's attention to be on as well at a certain point in her discourse. This target can be located near or far in either the speech-internal (anaphoric) or the speech-external (deictic) environment. At her selected discourse point, she places a “trigger” — one of a special set of mainly closed-class forms (e.g., English this, that, here, there, now, then). This trigger directs the hearer to perform a certain three-stage procedure. In the first stage, he seeks all available “cues” to the target. Such cues belong to ten different categories representing ten distinct sources of information. In the second stage, he combines the cues he has determined so as to narrow down to the speaker's intended target. In the third stage, he maps the concept of the target he has determined back onto the trigger and integrates it into the overall conception expressed by the sentence. A trigger is lexicalized to occur in a particular interaction between the speaker and hearer. This interaction incrementally leads to their joint attention on the target. In a special process of constructive discrepancy, the speaker can introduce conflicting cues that lead the hearer to resolve the conflict and find the intended target.