The Boundaries of Babel

In The Boundaries of Babel, Andrea Moro describes an encounter between two cultures: contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences. As a leading theoretical linguist in the generative tradition and also a neuroscientist, Moro is uniquely equipped to tell this story. Moro examines what he calls the "hidden" revolution in contemporary science: the discovery that the number of possible grammars is not infinite and that their number is biologically limited. This will require us to rethink not just the fundamentals of linguistics and neurosciences but also our view of the human mind. Moro searches for neurobiological correlates of "the boundaries of Babel" -- the constraints on the apparent chaotic variation in human languages -- by using an original experimental design based on artificial languages exploiting neuroimaging techniques. This second edition includes a new chapter in which Moro extends the exploration of the boundaries of Babel in search of the source of order with which all hum

Andrea Moro is a Professor of General Linguistics at the Institute for Advanced Study IUSS Pavia, Italy, where he is also Director of the Research Center for Neurolinguistics and Theoretical Syntax (NEtS). Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at MIT and the author of many influential books on linguistics.