The Sound of Thought

From a physical point of view, language is made of waves: acoustic waves (outside us) and electric waves (inside us). How similar are these two types of waves? By exploiting awake surgery procedures a crucial experiment is described confronting these two types of waves when a patient reads a linguistic expression aloud or silently. The surprising result is that the two electric waves are very similar even in non acoustic areas opening the possibility to read the linguistic thought directly from the brain.

Toward the Source of Order

Is language structure influenced by the organization of the physical world as observed by means of our senses? Or is it rather the opposite, namely the structure of language influences our perception and representation of the world. After some historical observation the notion of analogy and anomaly is explored by providing a clear empirical case constituted by those sentences which contain the verb “to be” as a main verb (copular sentences):

Intermezzo or What Exists When a Tree Exists?

It is sometimes assumed that formal representation of language are abstractions and that they contrast with the concreteness of empirical neurobiological measures. It is argued that this is not so and that, moreover, the formal representations adopted in linguistics are also detectable by providing the right stimulus to the subjects at the neurobiological level; one example is given by the asymmetry of constituent structure.

The Boundaries of Babel

One of the major discoveries of modern linguistics is that languages do not vary arbitrarily: for example, all syntactic rules must be based on hierarchical structure generated by recursive procedure rather than linear order. Neuroimaging techniques have shown that these formal restrictions constituting the boundaries of Babel are in fact represented in the brain for people who learn non-recursive artificially designed rules do not involve those neural circuits that underpin language computation. The boundaries of Babels cannot be cultural and arbitrary.

Learning from the Impossible

Understanding the nature and the structure of human language coincides with capturing the constraints which make a conceivable language possible or, equivalently, whether there are impossible languages at all. The chapter focuses on syntax, the capacity to generate potentially infinite sentences from a fixed limited set of words: ever since Descartes this has been considered the fingerprint of human mind. Modern syntax has allowed a mathematical approach to this domain.

Better Than Possible: Artificial Languages

The human capacity to construe artificial languages has been manifested in several distinct domains including at least the following goals: to increase communication, to explore real languages, to avoid philosophical and logical ambiguities and to evoke imaginary worlds. This chapter analyses these goals and reveals that the notion of impossible language has been productive even outside linguistic research.

The Inverse Thunderstorm

Since language structure is obviously not specifically designed to facilitate communication the question of the origin of the restriction on possible languages emerges. This constitutes a major problem for we may not be able to reconstruct the selective pressure which generated them. Historical parallels are investigated where brain activity was thought to be

The Unreasonable Sieve

The regularities expressed by sentences are not guided by meaning as it is clear by jabberwoki or by contradictory statements. These regularities are rather governed by structural restrictions which need to be explored on a par with other laws of nature. Unveiling these restrictions is in fact a step toward understanding language acquisition since they must precede linguistic experience in children.

Capturing the “Stem Mind”

Every child is open to acquire any language in the same average amount of time at the same average age and disregard the language her or his parents acquired. Moreover children all make similar errors in all languages and these are only a subset of all potential errors they could make if this were a trial and error process. This process must then be assisted by a genetic guide: linguistics can be regarded as a theory of the limits of experience on language structure.

A Closer Look at the Turtle’s Eyes

What can we expect to be our understanding of human languages given what we have understood from exploiting the notion of impossible language? The chapter discusses the limits of our understanding, highlighting the elusiveness of linguistic creativity, and suggest a possible scenario where all syntactic rules can be translated in a geometrical representation (call it “Euclidean Grammars”).