This chapter presents a historical sketch of biolinguistics. It explains the knowledge of language, and explores how language develops in a child, and how language evolves in a species. These three questions are interrelated in a particular way. The question of how language develops in the child depends on understanding what the properties of the language system are, the answer to the question about what knowledge of language is. The third question about how language evolved in the species, depends crucially on the answers to the first two questions. In practice, one only has partial answers to all three questions, so that it becomes necessary to study all the questions in parallel, constantly revising the answers as new empirical data becomes available. A conceptual breakthrough was achieved with the development of the principles and parameters approach to language acquisition.

This chapter offers a satisfactory account of morphological processing within the overall language system from a neurobiological perspective. It discusses the computational primitives in morphology and their possible brain correlates. The chapter reviews research on the two morphological distinctions that have attracted the most attention in the literature on the neural bases of morphological processing: regular versus irregular morphology and inflection versus derivation. It argues that neither of these two oppositions appears suited to explaining how morphology is organized in the brain. The chapter offers some more positive suggestions regarding the neural representation and processing of morphology. It also argues for the primarily relational role of morphology, which serves to distinguish it from the combinatory nature of syntax, and for the importance of distinguishing between purely formal and interpretively relevant relations in this regard.