Abstract
For over sixty years, researchers from all over the world have been collaborating on a vast undertaking to describe human languages within what has come to be known as generative linguistics, with the extraordinary aim of understanding their invariant core and fundamental properties. Drawing on an immense body of linguistic data, they seek to capture not only the general properties of language and the parameters of variation between languages, but also the ability of speakers to produce new utterances, based on a few essential language procedures. This field also has a developmental dimension: how do children learn their language? Why do they go through systematic phases? - And, of course, a historical dimension: how has the structure of languages evolved over the centuries? Today, these efforts are leading to a mapping of syntactic structures, which can draw on a rich dialogue with cognitive sciences.
Many of these questions will be at the heart of the work of the new General Linguistics Chair at the Collège de France, entrusted to linguist Luigi Rizzi, who has worked at the universities of Geneva and Siena, and is a distinguished member of the British Academy, the Academia Europaea, the Linguistic Society of America, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Luigi Rizzi is the author of over 175 articles, which have had a considerable impact in formal linguistics, but also far beyond, to the frontiers of cognitive science, biology and digital science. His scientific work is unrivalled in four central themes of contemporary linguistics: the study of invariance and variation between languages; locality theory; the mapping of syntactic structures; and language acquisition. Between 2014 and 2019, he was the winner and principal investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) for the project Syntactic Cartography and Locality in Adult Grammar and Language Acquisition (SynCart).
