BOUNDARIES OF BABEL

In The Boundaries of Babel, Andrea Moro tells the story of an encounterbetween two cultures: contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitiveneurosciences. The study of language within a biological context has been ongoingfor more than fifty years. The development of neuroimaging technology offers newopportunities to enrich the "biolinguistic perspective" and extend itbeyond an abstract framework for inquiry. As a leading theoretical linguist in thegenerative tradition and also a cognitive scientist schooled in the new imagingtechnology, Moro is uniquely equipped to explore this. Moro examines what he callsthe "hidden" revolution in contemporary science: the discovery that thenumber of possible grammars is not infinite and that their number is biologicallylimited. This radical but little-discussed change in the way we look at language, heclaims, will require us to rethink not just the fundamentals of linguistics andneurosciences but also our view of the human mind. Moro searches for neurobiologicalcorrelates of "the boundaries of Babel"--the constraints on the apparentchaotic variation in human languages--by using an original experimental design basedon artificial languages. He offers a critical overview of some of the fundamentalresults from linguistics over the last fifty years, in particular regarding syntax, then uses these essential aspects of language to examine two neuroimagingexperiments in which he took part. He describes the two neuroimaging techniques used(positron emission topography, or PET, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, orfMRI), but makes it clear that techniques and machines do not provide interestingdata without a sound theoretical framework. Finally, he discusses some speculativeaspects of modern research in biolinguistics regarding the impact of the linearstructure of linguistics expression on grammar, and more generally, some coreaspects of language acquisition, genetic, s and evolution.Andrea Moro is Professor ofGeneral Linguistics at the San Raffaele University in Milan.