new book – The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages
Written on June 6, 2008
The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages (Current Studies in Linguistics) by Andrea Moro (MIT Press, 2008)
From the product description:
In The Boundaries of Babel, Andrea Moro 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 leading theoretical linguist in the generative tradition and also a cognitive scientist schooled in the new imaging technology, Moro is uniquely equipped to explore this.
Moro 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, he claims, will require us to rethink not just the fundamentals of linguistics and neurosciences but also our view of the human mind.
Filed in: cognitive science,mind,new books.
