FULL ISSUE, part 1

The Editors
2012 Biolinguistics  
The old saying that writing a book is like giving birth to a baby (or an elephant) certainly captures the process of putting this special issue together. But in the end we made it and are happy to present a comprehensive collection that reviews and advances the emerging field of "embodiment of language". To say a few words about the genesis of this special issue, we were first approached in September 2011 by a Biolinguistics editorial board member with the suggestion to put together a volume
more » ... ed on the 'Embodied Language' conference which took place at New College, Oxford University (26-28 September 2011, http://www.newcollegeembodiedlanguage.com). We were intrigued by the possibility, least of all because it does offer new ways of probing language in the species, but also because of the top-notch research on mirror neurons coming from the field. We are very excited about presenting some of that research andthrough some review articles -its history. The organizer of that conference, Dr. Robin M. Allott, was kind enough to get things going as guest editor. He invited the participants, and some colleagues beyond, to submit their full-fledged papers to Biolinguistics for a full peer-review process. It is then that things went somewhat awry. Not being specialists on the topic ourselves (and the same could be said for most of the reviewers we have on file), we relied on Dr. Allott's expertise to help us find suitable reviewers. To cut a long story short, we invited a total of 67 colleagues to serve as peer-reviewers for the collection, intending two different reviewers for each submission, of who 42 turned down our request or failed to respond. The entire process took considerably longer than planned, and we had to find a number of last-minute peerreviewers ourselves as well. If that weren't enough, Dr. Allott pulled out of his envisioned guest editorship in the finishing stages of the project as well. But all good things end well. And without further ado, we invite the reader on an enlightening journey through embodied language. This paper places embodiment in an evolutionary perspective and endeavors to show that as incipient speakers began forging a linguistic system, they molded their grammatical distinctions and syntactic functions on their perception of the outside world, but that in the course of evolution, these perceptually-tinkered features were gradually replaced with mental constructs, specifically conceived to serve linguistic purposes and serve them with increased potentiality and greater efficiency. The shift from perceptual to conceptual implements is perhaps most conspicuously visible in writing, where open-ended figurative hieroglyphs were replaced with a small set of abstract letters, but the process is pervasive. In syntax, the phenomenal notion of agency, so deeply anchored in our activities, and the entire grammatical system built thereupon were replaced with a model where agency is irrelevant and syntax is structured on the purely mental constructs of subject and object. The paper continues with further cases of disembodiment.
doaj:bed162fa24444775a70b3566e5ba3dce fatcat:wsqhp2tsbvcofc7ezol4cgzi4y