Neurolinguistics

Neurolinguistics aims at studying the correlates between (the computation of) linguistic structures and the neurophysiological response of the brain as one can infer from the quantitative measures obtained by different techniques (mainly, neuroimaging and electrophysiological methods). This new field was made possible by the revolution of generative grammar whose project is twofold: decomposing the complexity of linguistic structures as they are described by traditional taxonomies into primitive entities systematically and uncover the simple compositional operations composing them, within a finite and relatively small set of cross-linguistics differences. Accordingly, in the first part of the course some fundamental ideas of general linguistics will be addressed: in particular, syntax, i.e. the exclusive boundary between human languages and all the other animals’ systems of communications. Three fundamental syntactic domains will be approached in a unitary way: recursion, locality and displacement, with a particular emphasis on the role of symmetry. By relying on these linguistic premises, some major neurobiological issues will be addressed both at the theoretical and empirical level by illustrating concrete experiments: what is the function of the boundaries of Babel? When is sound paired with meaning in the brain? How is negation computed in the brain? Can the electrophysiological correlate of some basic syntactic structures be captured while factoring out acoustic information?All in all, the aim of the course is to propose a theory, a method and tools to answer a fundamental question: what are human languages made of that there exist impossible ones?