The Boundaries of Babel, Volume 46

Andrea Moro is Professor of General Linguistics at the Institute for Advanced Study (IUSS) in Pavia, Italy. He is the author of Dynamic Antisymmetry, Impossible Languages, and The Boundaries of Babel (all published by the MIT Press), and other books, including The Raising of Predicates and I Speak, Therefore I Am.

An exploration of what research at the intersection of contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences can reveal about the constraints on the apparently chaotic variation in human languages.

Andrea Moro has gained a unique position in formulating and implementing constructive approaches to... difficult and demanding tasks. He is able to address them with a deep understanding of modern linguistics, a field to which he has made a major contribution of his own, and mastery of the relevant technology and its potential. His new book is a lucid introduction to these exciting areas, superbly informed and imaginatively presented, with intriguing implications well beyond biolinguistics... A rare achievement... -- Noam Chomsky, from the foreword In this engaging, informative, and provocative book, a leading theoretical linguist shows why so many of us are so excited about the 'biolinguistic revolution.' Neuroscientists can discover some of the central ideas of current Chomskian linguistics; linguists can learn some of the core conceptsof neuroscience; and anyone interested can see how the two fields are beginning to come together. -- Howard B. Lasnik, Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland