3 - Biolinguistics yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Summary

In the mid 1970s, biology was starting an exploration of the regulatory mechanisms that determine the activation and inactivation of genes. The study of language pathologies, notably aphasia, became increasingly relevant and researchers with a solid background in linguistic theory started having a closer look. Early studies in language acquisition contributed to divorce the spontaneous growth of language in the child from any kind of inductive trial-and-error mechanism. Evidence from different sources had converged onto a better picture of modularity, maturation, and the poverty of the stimulus. The increasing success of evo-devo suggests entirely new ways of looking at the evolutionary relation between genes, mostly paying attention to regulatory genes, across species and phyla. Speaking of future generations, when hopefully biolinguistics will turn into a domain such that BS or BA majors will exist in some universities, the chapter indulges in designing a curriculum, in broad terms.