Language in Cognition (eBook)

Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), and a member of the Center for Theoretical Linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Most recently he was Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He is the author of Islands and Chains (2003), Linguistic Minimalism (2006), Understanding Minimalist Syntax (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), and Bare Syntax (2008); and the founding co-editor, with Kleanthes K. Grohmann, of the Open Access journal Biolinguistics.

Acknowledgments viii

Prologue xi

Part I Ever Since Chomsky 1

1 Mind Matters: Chomsky's Dangerous Idea 3

2 The Mechanization of the Mind Picture 14

3 How the Mind Grows: From Meno to Noam 41

Part II Unweaving the Sentence 55

4 Mental Chemistry 57

5 The Variety of Linguistic Experience: The Towers of Babel and Pisa 82

6 All Roads Lead to Universal Grammar 95

Part III The Mental Foundations of Behavior 109

7 Making Sense of Meaning: An Instruction Manual 111

8 Wonderful Mental Life: Unthinkable without Language 120

9 Grammar Caught in the Act 133

Part IV Missing Links 147

10 The (Mis)Measure of Mind 149

11 Homo Combinans 163

12 Computational Organology 173

Epilogue 183

Notes 189

Guide to Further Study 211

References 219

Index 242

"Amongst the book's strengths, particularly commendable are the
connections made to other cognitive domains and the biological
sciences." (The Linguist, July 2010)

"Although each subsection is brief, the author includes
chapter-by-chapter notes of cited material at the end of the text.
The motivated reader will have no trouble tracking down the primary
sources that the author discusses." (PsycCRITIQUES, March
2010)

"Boeckx has a deep familiarity with all of the (very wide-ranging)
material he presents, and has done original and important work in
several of these areas. He is a lucid and engaging expositor, and
is highly qualified in every respect to undertake an enterprise of
this nature ... [He] brings together the right topics, some
right at the edge or even at the horizons of research. If I were
teaching undergraduate or graduate courses in these areas, I cannot
think of a competing text that I would prefer."

-Noam Chomsky

"No one had integrated, yet, the key four notions "language",
"cognition", "mental" and "structures" in such a masterly and
original way. A wealth of discoveries awaits both the novice reader
and the expert. Cedric's art of revealing deep connections between
fields, authors and ideas has frequently prompted me, while reading
this book, to wonder why I had not seen those connections
before."

-Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, University of
Arizona

"If Linguistics is the queen of the cognitive sciences,
then Cedric Boeckx is her official court biographer. In one short
book, he clearly outlines how the developments in linguistics have
upended earlier empiricist conceptions of mind and spurred exciting
investigations of human evolution."

-Norbert Hornstein, University of Maryland

"Language in Cognition is not so much a book with facts
and concepts, as a long argument and discussion with the reader. It
is an argument that every serious student of the mind sciences
should know, even if they don't join the choir. Boeckx masterfully
presents the material, showing why biology must form a core part of
the mind sciences, and how the mind sciences, and especially
language, can pose new challenges for biology."

-Marc Hauser, Harvard College, Author of Moral
Minds

"Cedric Boeckx provides a wonderful, modern review of the
necessity of mentalism, of innate structure for all of the mind,
and the role of mathematics in articulating different principles of
representation for different modules of mind---a summary of the
Chomskyan revolution over the last half century. He brings
perspective to the project by connecting the history of philosophy
with modern experimentation showing that the
"generative" approach to both language and mind has
received stunning support in acquisition, processing, and aphasia.
At the same time, he acknowledges many mysteries: we do not know
what our "gut feelings" contain, though they are
central to humanity and dignity. They may also contain amalgams
combined from different modules in ways we do not understand, but
which also may ultimately submit to mathematical representation.
The book situates grammar in the broader sciences in a manner
accessible to the generally educated student or curious layman. It
is a superb introduction to the fundamental role of generative
thought in modern cognitive science, weaving together
psychological, biological, and philosophical
perspectives."

-Tom Roeper, University of Massachusetts, Amherst