While rudimentary communication systems exist in other animals, the use of syntactic structures seems to be unique to the human species. Only homo sapiens is able to express his thoughts precisely in sentences of arbitrary length and complexity. The human brain must therefore possess specific neural architectures that allow it to represent the structures of all human languages.
The aim of the 2015-2016 lecture was to review current knowledge of linguistic structures and how they relate to brain architecture as studied by neuropsychological or brain imaging methods. We are particularly interested in the field of syntax, which has the particularity of being based on embedded structures in the form of hierarchical trees (syntagms). The formation of syntagms by means of amerge operation, and their displacement within the hierarchical structure by means of a syntactic move operation, are properties that are probably universal to human languages, and we set out to break down their cerebral mechanisms.
The lecture was based on a series of publications and reference works, the main ones being :
- Baker, M. (2001). The atoms of language. New York: Basic Books.
- Chomsky, N. (1956). Three models for the description of language. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2(3), 113-124.
- Dehaene, S., Meyniel, F., Wacongne, C., Wang, L., & Pallier, C. (2015). The Neural Representation of Sequences: From Transition Probabilities to Algebraic Patterns and Linguistic Trees. Neuron, 88(1), 2-19.
- Fitch, W. T. (2014). Toward a computational framework for cognitive biology: unifying approaches from cognitive neuroscience and comparative cognition. Physics of Life Reviews, 11(3), 329-364.
- Fromkins, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2010). An Introduction to Language, 9th Edition (9th edition). Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
- Haegeman, L. (2005). Thinking Syntactically: A Guide to Argument and Analysis. New York: Wiley.
- Hale, J. (2015). Automaton Theories of Human Sentence Comprehension. Sanford, California: Center for the Study of Language and Inf.
- Kemmerer, D. (2014). Cognitive Neuroscience of Language. New York, NY: Psychology Press.
- Lenneberg, E. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language. New York: Wiley.
- Marcus, G. F. (2001). The Algebraic Mind - Integrating Connectionism & Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
- Moro, A. (2008/2015). The boundaries of Babel (2nd edition). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
- Pinker, S. (1995). The language instinct. London: Penguin.
- Sportiche, D., Koopman, H. & Stabler, E. (2013). An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.