A Critical Review on the Book “Impossible Languages”

“Impossible Languages”, written by the Italian linguist and neurologist Andrea Moro, and published in 2016 by the MIT Press, includes themes that were also covered in parts of Moro’s previous book, “The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages” (Moro, 2015; translated from Italian into English, with a foreword by Noam Chomsky). The book is organized into eleven chapters, and, together with the list of references and an index, contains a total of 145 pages. In this book, the author explores what makes human language unique and different from any other communication system — the so-called fingerprint of human language, as referred to in the book — and presents interesting theoretical and empirical evidence in favor of a biological interpretation of human language structure, which includes some of the latest findings from neuroimaging studies in the last two decades. The present article will briefly look at the content of the book.