Andrea Moro

• Ph. D. DES
• Professor (Full) at Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori IUSS di Pavia

Acoustic, lexical, and syntactic information are simultaneously processed in the brain requiring complex strategies to distinguish their electrophysiological activity. Capitalizing on previous works that factor out acoustic information, we could concentrate on the lexical and syntactic contribution to language processing by testing competing statis...

Acoustic, lexical and syntactic information is simultaneously processed in the brain. Therefore, distinguishing the electrophysiological activity pertaining to these components requires complex and indirect strategies. Capitalizing on previous works which factor out acoustic information, we could concentrate on the lexical and syntactic contributio...

We aim at offering a contribution to highlight the essential differences between Large Language Models (LLM) and the human language faculty. More explicitly, we claim that the existence of impossible languages for humans does not have any equivalent for LLM making them unsuitable models of the human language faculty, especially for a neurobiologica...

We aim at offering a contribution to highlight the essential differences between Large Language Models (LLM) and the human language faculty. More explicitly, we claim that the existence of impossible languages for humans does not have any equivalent for LLM making them unsuitable models of the human language faculty, especially for a neurobiologica...

Objective. Syntax involves complex neurobiological mechanisms, which are difficult to disentangle for multiple reasons. Using a protocol able to separate syntactic information from sound information we investigated the neural causal connections evoked by the processing of homophonous phrases, i.e. with the same acoustic information but with differe...

A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language processing, vs. those who believe that discrete hierarchical structures implementing linguistic information such as...

A sharp tension exists about the nature of human language between two opposite parties: those who believe that statistical surface distributions, in particular using measures like surprisal, provide a better understanding of language processing, vs. those who believe that discrete hierarchical structures implementing linguistic information such as...

Syntax involves complex neurobiological mechanisms, which are difficult to disentangle for multiple reasons. Using a protocol able to separate syntactic information from sound information we investigated the neural causal connections evoked by the processing of homophonous phrases, either verb phrases (VP) or noun phrases (NP). We used event-relate...

We test if firms statistically discriminate workers based on race when employer learning is asymmetric. Using data from the NLSY79, we find evidence of asymmetric employer learning. In addition, employers statistically discriminate against non-college-educated black workers at time of hiring. We also find that employers directly observe most of the...

This work explores two kinds of asymmetries within the class of nominal copular (NC) constructions under the unified theory of copular sentences deriving the two basic configurations from a unique underlying structure via raising, namely canonical vs. inverse. Using acceptability judgments, we first tested wh- sub-extraction from both determiner ph...

In this paper we describe the distribution of propredicative clitics in nominal copular constructions across different Italo-romance varieties. Different lexical items are recruited from the lexicon to cliticize the predicative NP, all of them either lack inflection or show a neuter inflection: the ‘uninflected’ status of propredicatives, in fact,...

This work focuses on a particular case of negative sentences, the Surprise Negation sentences (SNEGs). SNEGs belong to the class of expletive negation sentences, i.e., they are affirmative in meaning but involve a clausal negation. A clear example is offered by Italian: ‘Enonmi è scesa dal treno Maria?!’ (let. ‘and not CLITIC.to_me is got off-the t...

Syntax is a species-specific component of human language combining a finite set of words in a potentially infinite number of sentences. Since words are by definition expressed by sound, factoring out syntactic information is normally impossible. Here, we circumvented this problem in a novel way by designing phrases with exactly the same acoustic co...

Objective: To understand whether the clinical phenotype of nonfluent/agrammatic primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA) could present differences depending on the patient's native language. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we analyzed connected speech samples in monolingual English (nfvPPA-E) and Italian speakers (nfvPPA-I) who were diagnose...

Predication is the fundamental grammatical relation defining clausal structures in all (and only) human languages. This notion is by definition compositional, since it consists of a link between a subject and a predicate. The central question addressed here is whether this traditional notion, which has never been dismissed ever since the canonical...

In this paper we discuss two types of nominal copular sentences (Canonical and Inverse, Moro 1997) and we demonstrate how the peculiarities of these two configurations are hardly considered by standard NLP tools that are currently publicly available. Here we show that example-based MT tools (e.g. Google Translate) as well as other NLP tools (UDpipe...

Nominal copular sentences [DP V DP] can be distinguished in: canonical (1) subject+copula+predicative expression and inverse predicative expression-copula-subject (2) (Moro 1997). (1) [SubjDPThe picture]i is[SmallClause_ti[DPthe cause of the riot]]. (2) [PredDPThe cause of the riot]j is[SmallClause [SubjDPthe picture]_tj] Different syntactic as...

Syntax is a species-specific component of human language combining a finite set of words in a potentially infinite number of sentences. Since words are by definition expressed by sound, factoring out syntactic information is normally impossible. Here, we circumvented this problem in a novel way by designing phrases with exactly the same acoustic co...

Syntax is traditionally defined as a specifically human way to pair sound with meaning: words are assembled in a recursive way generating a potentially infinite set of sentences 1,2 . There can be different phrasal structures depending on the types of words involved, for example, “noun phrases” (NP), combining an article and a noun, vs. “verb phras...

Consider time as a total order among discrete events. If we look at human languages, a total order is always established among discrete events, which are the distinct pronunciations of the words (and morphemes they are formed by) in a sentence. Notice that this is not a necessary condition: if we think of the total order as a restriction imposed by...

This chapter takes a brief look at the most important schools of thought over the centuries about the verb to be . Sifting through Western linguistic tradition, it is possible to find at least three schools of thought that regarded the verb to be , so to speak, as the name of three different concepts closely dependent upon the manner in which their...

A journey through linguistic time and space, from Aristotle through the twentieth century's “era of syntax,” in search of a dangerous verb and its significance. Beginning with the early works of Aristotle, the interpretation of the verb to be runs through Western linguistic thought like Ariadne's thread. As it unravels, it becomes intertwined with...

Questions raised by the brief history of the verb can be grouped into three distinct research areas: questions about the formal mechanisms that interact in structuring sentences; questions about how these mechanisms are implemented physically in the brain; questions about what these sentences tell us in general about natural language as a biologica...

This chapter analyzes some special verbs, that is, verbs that do not have a subject. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 3.1 looks at a central structural property of natural languages, involving a special type of syntactic movement called “raising.” Section 3.2 analyzes the verb to be and examines the main stages that led to the canonical...

This chapter reconstructs the environment in which the verb to be will be understood in a new way. It identifies three radical changes, conceptually distinct but not completely unrelated, that come into play when looking at language from the structuralist perspective. First, if what matters are the relationships, elements that have the same relatio...

One of the basic premises of the theory of syntax is that clause structures can be minimally identified as containing a verb phrase that plays the role of predicate and a noun phrase that plays the role of subject. Copular sentences – that is, sentences that contain the verb to be or its (verbal) equivalent across languages – depart from this patte...

After a short theoretical and historical introduction to the notion of existential sentence, there ‐sentences are introduced and their peculiar syntactic properties are illustrated in detail. Two symmetrical accounts are presented as competing to explain these properties: the standard account; and an alternative one, which appears to capture the em...

Language serves as a cornerstone of human cognition. However, our knowledge about its neural basis is still a matter of debate, partly because 'language' is often ill-defined. Rather than equating language with 'speech' or 'communication', we propose that language is best described as a biologically determined computational cognitive mechanism that...

A wide range of studies on language assessment during awake brain surgery is nowadays available. Yet, a consensus on a standardized protocol for intraoperative language mapping is still lacking. More specifically, very limited information is offered about intraoperative assessment of a crucial component of language such as syntax. This review aims...

Unraveling the evolution of human language is no small enterprise. One could start digging somewhere in the largely unobservable past, working forwards to the present, hoping to surface in the right spot. Alternatively, one could start with the currently observed and well-established properties of human language, the phenotype of language, and work...

Language assessment has a crucial role in the clinical diagnosis of several neurodegenerative diseases. The analysis of extended speech production is a precious source of information encompassing the phonetic, phonological, lexico-semantic, morpho-syntactic, and pragmatic levels of language organization. The knowledge about the distinctive linguist...

The papers assembled in this volume aim to contribute to our understanding of the human capacity for language: the generative procedure that relates sounds and meanings via syntax. Different hypotheses about the properties of this generative procedure are under discussion, and their connection with biology is open to important cross-disciplinary wo...

Background: There is an increasing need of assessing functional communication in daily activities and the impact on the quality of life from the perspective of the major protagonists of life situations following aphasia. Several instruments are available for English. One of the most recent is the Communication Outcome after Stroke scale for patient...

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 im...

Since language structure is obviously not specifically designed to facilitate communication the question of the origin of the restriction on possible languages emerges. This constitutes a major problem for we may not be able to reconstruct the selective pressure which generated them. Historical parallels are investigated where brain activity was th...

The human capacity to construe artificial languages has been manifested in several distinct domains including at least the following goals: to increase communication, to explore real languages, to avoid philosophical and logical ambiguities and to evoke imaginary worlds. This chapter analyses these goals and reveals that the notion of impossible la...

From a physical point of view, language is made of waves: acoustic waves (outside us) and electric waves (inside us). How similar are these two types of waves? By exploiting awake surgery procedures a crucial experiment is described confronting these two types of waves when a patient reads a linguistic expression aloud or silently. The surprising r...

One of the major discoveries of modern linguistics is that languages do not vary arbitrarily: for example, all syntactic rules must be based on hierarchical structure generated by recursive procedure rather than linear order. Neuroimaging techniques have shown that these formal restrictions constituting the boundaries of Babel are in fact represent...

What can we expect to be our understanding of human languages given what we have understood from exploiting the notion of impossible language? The chapter discusses the limits of our understanding, highlighting the elusiveness of linguistic creativity, and suggest a possible scenario where all syntactic rules can be translated in a geometrical repr...

Every child is open to acquire any language in the same average amount of time at the same average age and disregard the language her or his parents acquired. Moreover children all make similar errors in all languages and these are only a subset of all potential errors they could make if this were a trial and error process. This process must then b...

It is sometimes assumed that formal representation of language are abstractions and that they contrast with the concreteness of empirical neurobiological measures. It is argued that this is not so and that, moreover, the formal representations adopted in linguistics are also detectable by providing the right stimulus to the subjects at the neurobio...

The apparent complexity of the syntax of sentences can be decomposed into the interaction of some primitive and simple operations much as the complex design of snowflakes results from conditions on molecular interactions. In fact, the entire language can be regarded as a snowflake in that its structure is not progressively evolved via casual mutati...

Understanding the nature and the structure of human language coincides with capturing the constraints which make a conceivable language possible or, equivalently, whether there are impossible languages at all. The chapter focuses on syntax, the capacity to generate potentially infinite sentences from a fixed limited set of words: ever since Descart...

The regularities expressed by sentences are not guided by meaning as it is clear by jabberwoki or by contradictory statements. These regularities are rather governed by structural restrictions which need to be explored on a par with other laws of nature. Unveiling these restrictions is in fact a step toward understanding language acquisition since...

Is language structure influenced by the organization of the physical world as observed by means of our senses? Or is it rather the opposite, namely the structure of language influences our perception and representation of the world. After some historical observation the notion of analogy and anomaly is explored by providing a clear empirical case c...

The new edition of a pioneering book that examines research at the intersection of contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences.

One of the major challenges in the study of language in schizophrenia is to identify specific levels of the linguistic structure that might be selectively impaired. While historically a main semantic deficit has been widely claimed, results are mixed, and there is evidence of syntactic impairment as well. This might be due to heterogeneity in mater...

We present results from an acceptability judgment study combined with an eye-tracking study on wh-islands with the aim of identifying the locus of the difficulty in the processing of wh-island.

Significance The results of our experiments show that a special representation of sound is actually exploited by the brain during language generation, even in the absence of speech. Taking advantage of data collected during neurosurgical operations on awake patients, here we cross-correlated the cortical activity in the frontal and temporal languag...

The volume is a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Noam Chomsky's groundbreaking Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.

Language and communication dysfunctions have been widely reported among patients with schizophrenia and they may contribute to the social disability that characterizes the illness. Recent research pointed out different impairments at the pragmatic level, i.e., in the ability to match language and context. However, the evidence is stili sparse. We a...

How complex is human language? Every chapter in this volume is devoted, in one way or another, to addressing this question. The great majority of the chapters focus on the question of whether languages can be compared in terms of their relative degree of complexity. The present chapter, however (along with the one by Trotzke and Zwart) takes a some...

We are living in an era when communication has never been easier. In the small world of the academy, we contact many more people every single day than any scholar of the pre-industrial era could have met in his entire life. The result, however, is that contacts tend to be reduced to electronic messages or, when time is generous, to video conference...

One of the major discoveries in the history of 20th century linguistics is that the linear sequence of words constituting a sentence is organized in a hierarchical and recursive fashion. Is this hierarchical structure similar to action and motor planning, as recent proposals suggest? Some crucial differences are highlighted on both theoretical and...

Pragmatic and cognitive accounts of figurative language posit a difference between metaphor and metonymy in terms of underlying conceptual operations. Recently, other pragmatic uses of words have been accounted for in the Relevance Theory framework, such as approximation, described in terms of conceptual adjustment that varies in degree and directi...

This book assembles a collection of papers in two different domains: formal syntax and neurolinguistics. Here Moro provides evidence that the two fields are becoming more and more interconnected and that the new fascinating empirical questions and results in the latter field cannot be obtained without the theoretical base provided by the former.

Neuroimaging techniques, such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging are essential tools for the analysis of organized neural systems in working and resting states, both in physiological and pathological conditions. They provide evidence of coupled metabolic and cerebral local blood flow changes that strictly depe...

Human languages can express opposite propositions by means of a negative operator not that turns affirmative sentences into negative ones. Psycholinguistic research has indicated that negative meanings are formed by transiently reducing the access to mental representations of negated conceptual information. Neuroimaging studies have corroborated th...

Why must a coordinative head show up before an adverbial wh-phrase in situ in Italian? In this article, I explore this rather neglected fact, showing that it reveals an otherwise hidden structure. More specifically, I propose that the coordinative head does not directly merge with the wh-phrase it precedes; rather, it takes a full clausal complemen...

Converging evidence indicates that the processing of some aspects related to the phonetic and the semantic components of language is tightly associated with both the perceptual and the motor neural systems. It has been suggested that mirror neurons contribute to language understanding by virtue of a neurophysiological response matching perceptual l...

Suppose that an archeologist of the future finds keyboards that belong to electronic computers only but not to mechanical typewriters. How could the archeologist explain the fact that only one type of key letter layout, namely the “QWERTY” layout, was available in the English speaking world? The explanation for this apparently chaotic (i.e., non-al...

There are works in science that become important not only for the relevance of the empirical and theoretical findings they originally provide but also because they come at a special moment and help the scientific community to disentangle the debate when things start to get involuted and research paths tend to go in circles. The work presented by Pa...

Not all conceivable grammars are realized within human languages. Rules based on rigid distances, in which a certain word must occur at a fixed distance from another word, are never found in grammars of human languages. Distances between words are specified in terms of relative, non-rigid positions. The left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (Broca's ar...

Introduction: While sentence comprehension has been reported to be defective in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), it is still unclear if this disorder reflects the presence of syntactic impairment, or may be attributed to other factors, such as executive or working memory dysfunction. In order to assess the status of syntactic knowledge in a group of...

Sentential negation is a universal syntactic feature of human languages that reverses the truth value expressed by a sentence. An intriguing question concerns what brain mechanisms underlie our ability to represent and understand the meaning of negative sentences. We approach this issue by investigating action-related language processing and the as...

An exploration of what research at the intersection of contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences can reveal about the constraints on the apparently chaotic variation in human languages. In The Boundaries of Babel, Andrea Moro tells the story of an encounter between two cultures: contemporary theoretical linguistics and th...

One of the most remarkable abilities of bilinguals is to produce and/or to perceive a switch from one language to the other without any apparent difficulty. However, several psycholinguistic studies indicate that producing, recognizing, and integrating a linguistic code different from the one in current use may entail a processing cost for the spea...

Introduction: what is an existential sentence?Basic properties of existential sentencesDeriving the basic properties of existential sentencesOn the Definiteness Effect in existential sentences: are there parameters in semantics?Conclusion

While sentence comprehension has been reported to be defective in frontotemporal dementia (FTD), it is still unclear if this disorder reflects the presence of syntactic impairment, or may be attributed to other factors, such as executive or working memory dysfunction. In order to assess the status of syntactic knowledge in a group of patients belon...

Basal ganglia have been implicated in syntactic and phonological processes, but direct evidence has been scarce. Here, we used [11C]raclopride and positron emission tomography to measure modulations of the dopaminergic system induced by phonological or syntactic processing. Two significant effects were found. First, the level of accuracy in phonolo...

1. PREMESSA Questo articolo vuole essere un semplice contributo al dibattito sulla re-lazione tra linguistica e neuroscienze, in particolare a quel metodo d'inda-gine noto come «neuroimmagini». In questa sede, non verranno discussi i complessi problemi tecnici ed epistemologici legati alla sperimentazione né i risultati in campo neurofisiologico; l...

Language acquisition in humans relies on abilities like abstraction and use of syntactic rules, which are absent in other animals. The neural correlate of acquiring new linguistic competence was investigated with two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. German native speakers learned a sample of 'real' grammatical rules of differen...

All grammars must include some notion of movement accounting for discontinuous constituents which have been recognized since the very first post-Bloomfieldian syntactictians. What triggers movement? In the standard generative theory, movement is inherently associated with interpretation of morphological features: elements would move to cancel featu...

Movement is a specific property of human languages and one that has at least implicitly been recognized in all linguistic theories. The most recent development posits that movement is forced by morphological requirements (Chomsky 1995). In this paper I will suggest a different approach to movement, suggesting that it is essentially related to the g...

Some types of simple and logically possible syntactic rule never occur in human language grammars, leading to a distinction between grammatical and nongrammatical syntactic rules. Comparison of the neuroanatomical correlates underlying the acquisition of grammatical and nongrammatical rules can provide relevant evidence on the neural processes dedi...