Robert C. Berwick

We are born crying, but those cries signal the first stirring of language. Within a year or so, infants master the sound system of their language; a few years after that, they are engaging in conversations. This remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire any human language—“the language faculty”—raises important biological questions about language, including how it has evolved. This book by two distinguished scholars—a computer scientist and a linguist—addresses the enduring question of the evolution of language. Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky explain that until recently the evolutionary question could not be properly posed, because we did not have a clear idea of how to define “language” and therefore what it was that had evolved. But since the Minimalist Program, developed by Chomsky and others, we know the key ingredients of language and can put together an account of the evolution of human language and what distinguishes us from all other animals. Berwick and Chomsky discuss the biolinguistic perspective on language, which views language as a particular object of the biological world; the computational efficiency of language as a system of thought and understanding; the tension between Darwin's idea of gradual change and our contemporary understanding about evolutionary change and language; and evidence from nonhuman animals, in particular vocal learning in songbirds. (Source: [MIT Press](

This book is the first dedicated to linguistic parsing - the processing of natural language according to the rules of a formal grammar - in the Minimalist Program. While Minimalism has been at the forefront of generative grammar for several decades, it often remains inaccessible to computer scientists and others in adjacent fields. This volume makes connections with standard computational architectures, provides efficient implementations of some fundamental minimalist accounts of syntax, explores implementations of recent theoretical proposals, and explores correlations between posited structures and measures of neural activity during human language comprehension. These studies will appeal to graduate students and researchers in formal syntax, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computer science.

This text addresses one of the most famous and controversial arguments in the study of language and mind, the poverty of the stimulus. Internationally recognised scholars consider afresh the issues surrounding this argument and discuss its relation to the process of language acquisition.