Biolinguistics

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The biolinguistics understood as an interdisciplinary research field, in which the connection between biology and linguistics at the center. In particular, findings from cognitive science and ethology , neurobiology and genetics , anthropology , comparative psychology and theoretical linguistics are used to understand the evolution of human language. The language ability of humans is understood "as a biological property which - like other biological properties - has to be examined with the help of biological methods."

The research area of biolinguistics goes back to Eric Heinz Lenneberg , who in 1967 in his book Biological Foundations of Language, as an antithesis to linguistic-philosophical methods, took the view that language is a biological property, and also to linguistic preparatory work by Noam Chomsky . A fundamental question in this context is which aspects of language occur exclusively in humans, which homologous features can also be found in the sounds of animals and which genes are responsible for any similarities. The biolinguistic program claims - in contrast to the humanities-oriented linguistics - to be verifiable with the help of scientific methods.

The open access journal biolinguistics has been published for this subject since 2007 , a peer-reviewed specialist journal for theoretical linguistics with a focus on the biological foundations of human language. At the same time, the Biolinguistics Network was created in 2007 , an association of experts to promote biolinguistic research.

literature

  • Cedric Boeckx: Biolinguistics: forays into human cognitive biology. In: Journal of Anthropological Sciences. Volume 91, 2013, pp. 63–89, doi: 10.4436 / JASS.91009 , full text (PDF) .
  • Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky: Why Only Us. Language and Evolution. MIT Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-26203424-1 .
  • Cedric Boeckx and Kleanthes K. Grohmann (Eds.): The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics. Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-51198043-5 , doi: 10.1017 / CBO9780511980435 .
  • Ute Kreisel-Korz: Monkeys and Language: Studies on Biolinguistics. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 978-3-63133093-7 .
  • Lyle Jenkins: Biolinguistics: Exploring the biology of language. Cambridge University Press, New York 2000, ISBN 978-0521652339 .
  • Philip Lieberman: The biology and evolution of language. Revised edition. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1987, ISBN 978-0-67407413-2 .
  • Beate Marquardt: The human language and its biological requirements. G. Narr, Tübingen 1984.
  • Pedro Tiago Martins and Cedric Boeckx: What we talk about when we talk about biolinguistics. In: Linguistics Vanguard. Volume 2, No., 2016, doi: 10.1515 / lingvan-2016-0007 .
  • Andreas Trotske: Language Evolution: An Introduction. De Gruyter, 2017, ISBN 978-3-11051561-9
  • Wu Jieqiong: An Overview of Researches on Biolinguistics. In: Canadian Social Science. Volume 10, No. 1, 2014, pp. 171–176, full text (PDF) .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cedric Boeckx and Kleanthes K. Grohmann: The Biolinguistics Menifesto. In: biolinguistics. Volume 1, 2007, pp. 1–8, access to the full text
  2. ↑ The naming of the subjects follows a DFG project description from 2015.
  3. ↑ Antonia Rothmayr: Linguistics for Cognitive Science. An interdisciplinary addition to the introduction to linguistics. Narr Francke Attempo Verlag, Tübingen 2016, p. 20, ISBN 978-3-8233-8000-9
  4. ^ W. Tecumseh Fitch: What Would Lenneberg Think? Biolinguistics in the Third Millennium. In: biolinguistics. Volume 11, 2017, pp. 445–461, access to the full text
  5. ↑ Eric Heinz Lenneberg : Biological foundations of language. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1972. With an appendix by Noam Chomsky . At the same time Suhrkamp, ​​stw 217, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 978-3-518-27817-8 .
  6. ^ Noam Chomsky : The logical structure of linguistic theory. MIT, Cambridge 1955.
    Biolinguistics and the Human Capacity. Lecture by Noam Chomsky on May 17, 2004.
  7. ^ Website of the journal biolinguistics , last accessed on October 14, 2019.
  8. ^ Website of the Biolinguistics Network , last accessed on October 14, 2019.
  9. ↑ Anna Maria Di Sciullo: The Biolinguistics Network. In: biolinguistics. Volume 4, No. 1, 2010, access to the full text .