The Primacy of Grammar (Bradford Books)

The contemporary discipline of biolinguistics is beginning to have the feel ofscientific inquiry. Biolinguistics--especially the work of Noam Chomsky--suggests that the design oflanguage may be "perfect": language is an optimal solution to conditions of sound andmeaning. What is the scope of this inquiry? Which aspect of nature does this science investigate?What is its relation to the rest of science? What notions of language and mind are underinvestigation? This book is a study of such foundational questions. Exploring Chomsky's claims,Nirmalangshu Mukherji argues that the significance of biolinguistic inquiry extends beyond thedomain of language.
Biolinguistics is primarily concerned with grammars thatrepresent just the computational aspects of the mind/brain. This restriction to grammars, Mukherjiargues, opens the possibility that the computational system of human language may be involved ineach cognitive system that requires similar computational resources. Deploying analyticalargumentation and empirical evidence, Mukherji suggests that a computational system of languageconsisting of very specific principles and operations is likely to be involved in each articulatorysymbol system--such as music--that manifests unboundedness. In that sense, the biolinguisticsapproach may have identified, after thousands of years of inquiry, a specific structure of the humanmind.