This slender volume is based on a talk Chomsky gave at Boǧaziçi University in Istanbul in 2002 and the subsequent question-and-answer discussion. The talk specifically addressed the place of linguistics among other cognitive sciences. Chomsky expounded on the historical development and the philosophical premises of the current biolinguistic endeavor. One of the basic questions to be asked from the biological point of view on language is the extent to which purported principles of language are unique to this cognitive system. An even more basic question from the biological point of view is how much of language is uniquely human—that is, whether homologous elements can be found in other domains or organisms. The biolinguistic perspective views a person’s language in all of its aspects (i.e., sound, meaning, structure) as a state of some component of the mind or brain and thus as consequently comparable to other human-biological processes. Throughout the course of the lecture, Chomsky touched on issues of cognition, the development of linguistics as a science, and the place of linguistics among other natural sciences.

The questions that followed the lecture prompted Chomsky to expand his views of Universal Grammar (the common body of linguistic principles that all languages share and the parametric differences among them), the innateness hypothesis (the view that human beings are born prewired with some linguistic knowledge such as universal principles), and the validity of poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments (the view that language acquisition proceeds faster and more error-free than input observation and pattern noticing allow). The nature of the semantic component of the grammar and how lexical items are represented in the mental lexicon are also among the topics touched upon. The book represents a nice, compact, and completely accessible introduction to the fundamental questions and answers of biolinguistics. It can be used profitably as a first text in various classes on (first and second) language acquisition.