Impossible Languages

by Andrea Moro

"Can there be such a thing as an impossible human language? A biologist could describe an impossible animal as one that goes against the physical laws of nature (entropy, for example, or gravity). Are there any such laws that constrain languages? In this book, Andrea Moro -- a distinguished linguist and neuroscientist -- investigates the possibility of impossible languages, searching, as he does so, for the indelible fingerprint of human language. Moro shows how the very notion of impossible languages has helped shape research on the ultimate aim of linguistics: to define the class of...