50 Years Later: A Tribute to Eric Lenneberg's Biological Foundations of Language

Abstract

“The study of language is pertinent to many fields of inquiry,” reads the first sentence of the preface to Biological Foundations of Language. The serious scientific study of the biological foundations of the human capacity for language as one of the youngest branches of linguistic inquiry, nowadays frequently referred to using the label “biolinguistics,” began roughly half a century ago and was, in part, fuelled by the so-called “cognitive revolution” (Miller 2003) of the 1950s. Eric Lenneberg’s book Biological Foundations of Language, one of the field’s founding documents, was first published in 1967, that is exactly 50 years ago. Today, though not as universally known as it should be, Lenneberg’s book is regarded as a classic by most people in the field. Consequently, this year’s anniversary provides an excellent occasion for revisiting Lenneberg’s by now classic work and reassessing the scope, validity, and foresight of the evidence presented and arguments put forward. The purpose of this special issue thus is to reconsider and reflect on Eric Lenneberg’s ideas and how they influenced (or actually didn’t influence, because they were quickly forgotten) today’s field of biology of language. In his Biological Foundations of Language, amongst other things, Lenneberg already outlined the possibility of a genetics of language and wrote about language and the brain long before any of the multitude and major technological advancement in both, genetics and neuroimaging, that we have seen in the past decades were even looming on the horizon. A whole lot has been learned since Biological Foundations of Language was first published and there can be little doubt that Lenneberg would be amazed by