Biolinguistics 2 (2-3), 225-232 Two Neanderthals from El Sidrón (Asturias, Spain; Rosas et al. 2006) have been recently analyzed by Krause et al.(henceforth K) for possible mutations in FOXP2 (Krause et al. 2007), a gene involved in the faculty of language (Lai et al. 2001). Although these mutations were believed to be specific to modern […]

Modern (theoretical) linguistics was born half a century ago in the midst of what is often called the cognitive revolution. Noam Chomsky (1956, 1957), Morris Halle (1995, 2002), Eric Lenneberg (1967), and others distanced themselves from the then-dominant behaviorist paradigm, and reached back to earlier philosophical concerns, using the faculty of language as “a mirror […]

The Physics of Life Review In this paper we discuss how Fibonacci growth patterns are apparent in the structure of human language. We moreover show how familiar dynamics yielding these sorts of patterns in nature may be taken to apply, at some level of abstraction, for the human faculty of language. The overall picture casts […]

Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca” Julio de Urquijo”, 561-571 In this paper we treat the phenomenon of syntactic preference as a grammaticality judgment that emerges in situations of structural ambiguity. There seem to be instances where, despite the fact that several relevant structures for some terminal string are grammatical, speakers somehow feel that they […]