Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS    Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS

Andrea Moro

Babel's borders: the brain and the mystery of impossible languages.

 One of the major discoveries of modern linguistics is that languages cannot vary  unboundedly: every grammar must meet some universal principles which generate an  enormous but not infinite number of combinations in a modular way. The system is so complex that this underlying uniformity has excaped the attention of scholars for centuries. Only formal grammars have been able to arrive at this discovery in the last fifty years of  research. A crucial question that naturally arises from this state of affairs is whether the limit of variation among grammars is accidental or biologically driven. Recent methodologies that allow us to explore the functioning of the brain in vivo have allowed us to approach this question in a new way. By testing the acquisition of artificial languages which violate the universal principles of grammar it has been possible to provide strong evidence in favour of a biological perspective to the mystery of the absence of entire classes of conceivable grammars.