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Biolinguistics and the human language faculty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Anna Maria Di Sciullo  and
Lyle Jenkins
Anna Maria Di Sciullo*
Affiliation:
University of Quebec in Montreal
Lyle Jenkins*
Affiliation:
Biolinguistics Institute
*
[di_sciullo.anne-marie@uqam.ca]
[ljenkins2@comcast.net]
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Abstract

In recent years linguists have gained new insight into human language capacities on the basis of results from linguistics and biology. The so-called biolinguistic enterprise aims to fill in the explanatory gap between language and biology, on both theoretical and experimental grounds, hoping to reach a deeper understanding of language as a phenomenon rooted in biology. This research program is taking its first steps, and it has already given rise to new insights on the human language capacity, as well as to controversies, echoing debates that go back to the earlier days of generative grammar. The present discussion piece provides a high-level characterization of biolinguistics. It highlights the main articulation of this research program and points to recent studies linking language and biology. It also compares the biolinguistic program, as defined in Chomsky 2005 and Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011, to the view of the human language faculty presented in Jackendoff 2002 and Culicover & Jackendoff 2005, and to the discussion in Jackendoff 2011.

Keywords

biolinguisticsbiologyhuman language facultyuniversal grammarMergelanguage acquisitionminimalist programsymmetryassymetries

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Type
Discussion
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Language , Volume 92 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. e205 - e236
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

We wish to thank the participants of the Biolinguistic Conferences organized by Anna Maria Di Sciullo in 2010 and 2011 at UQAM, in 2013 at the GLOW meeting in Lund, and in 2015 at the IUSS Institute in Pavia, as well as three anonymous referees for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. This work has been supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the Major Collaborative Research Initiative on Interface Asymmetries (http://www.interfaceasymmetry.uqam.ca/) and the Fonds Québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture for the research on Dynamic Interfaces; see also http://www.biolinguistics.uqam.ca/.

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