I am a Research Professor at ICREA, and the Principal Investigator of the Cognitive Biology of Language research group at the University of Barcelona. My current research focuses on the neurobiological foundations of the human language faculty, with special emphasis on evolutionary issues. My graduate training and early career were in cognitive science and theoretical linguistics, but my more recent work has a more explicit biological, and experimental orientation. My current projects are all intended to facilitate integration among disciplines (linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and genetics), and lead to better experimental testing of theoretical hypotheses, as well as to more solid interpretations of experimental findings.
Language Evolution: Pluralism Instead of Minimalism
The Minimalism Program failed to deliver its promises. As it considered “Plato’s problem” (the logical problem of language acquisition) “solved”, and shifted from learnability to evolvability considerations, the cracks began to show. Neither Plato’s problem, nor its cousin, Darwin’s problem (the logical problem of language evolution) got solved, and the prospects are very grim indeed for reductionist approaches. In this talk I’ll review work we have been doing in recent years in the context of language evolution, show how they can be integrated with findings from other disciplines (as well as other research traditions in linguistics), and hopefully convince you that this is a more promising path to explore questions that have long been made more difficult because of harmful dichotomies.
