Linguistics as a branch of biology and mathematics

Speech and language are the most complex phenomena in biology. Yes, biology. So many of those working in this area often refer to it as biolinguistics. If human language was entirely the product of human culture, as argued by Mike Tomasello (2003, 2010), or if it was just a product of the need or desire to communicate, it would be expected to vary in all respects other than those which serve some given purpose. But it doesn’t.

All languages allow sentences to get longer and longer with no point at which this becomes impossible. So we can say, “She’s lying.” Or “You know she’s lying.” Or “I think you know she’s lying.” And so on. The child may only hear one step – as in “You know she’s lying.” But without needing to be told, learners somehow know that any number of steps are allowed, or they wouldn’t understand any numbers of steps greater than what they happen to have heard. This is known as ‘discrete infinity’, discrete because the structure is built from a small, finite number of elements, the sounds of the language, infinity because the number of possible sentences is infinite.

In 1965 Noam Chomsky proposed that the simplest explanation of discrete infinity is that there are underlying principles for language that we are born with, that are, in a species-specific way, encoded in the human genome. These principles are necessarily simple and abstract. The richness and complexity of human language is by the way these principles interact. By this reasoning, linguistic structures are ‘generated’ or built, rather than strung together as sequences of words.

In his recent work like Chomsky and others (2003), he seeks to minimise the role of the genome, but this is irrelevant to the point at issue here.

Because all known languages have this property of discrete infinity, other than by the highly questionable, and, I believe, quite mistaken claims of Daniel Everett (2009, 2023, 2018), the simplest explanation is by postulating that the commonality is by a property of the human species.

To a large degree, the development from the Transformational Generative Grammar, or TGG, of 1965 to the Biolinguistics of today is due to Chomsky. The notion of TGG is no longer appropriate. The role of transformations has now diminished or been eliminated entirely. But WHY does language work the way it does? As in 1965, the simplest explanation is that at least to some degree, the Faculty of Language is specified by the genome, as an aspect of biology, rather than psychology. This view, surprising to some, is hardly surprising to those familiar with the clear evidence of genetic and hereditary factors in speech and language disorders. But how is this if meanings are products of the mind? How do biology and mathematics come into it? By the proposal here, this involved a series of steps going back to a very early point in human history, the point at which the first words entered what would become the distinctively human lexicon, approximately a thousand times more sensitive and more capable of expansion throughout life than any non-human equivalent. And this became part of the normal human inheritance, necessarily expressed biologically. But in order for the linguistics to be expressible biologically, there has to be a mathematical foundation, as argued by the most recent work by Matilde Marcolli, Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick (2023).