Book Review: Impossible Languages

Abstract

Impossible Languages, written by the Italian linguist and neuroscientist Andrea Moro (2016), takes a new look at the biological foundations of language and explores what makes human language distinct from any other communication system—the “fingerprint” of human language, as the author puts it. The book is divided into 11 chapters and, together with the list of references and an index at the end of the book, contains a total of 145 pages. Moro begins his book by arguing that the ultimate goal of linguistics is to define the class of possible human languages, and then he poses two main questions to be addressed in the book: “Do impossible human languages exist at all? What is a language made of