Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), a member of the Universitat de Barcelona Institute of Neurosciences (UBNeuro), the Universitat de Barcelona Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS), and a member of the section of General Linguistics at the Universitat de Barcelona. Before joining ICREA, he was Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islands and Chains (2003), Linguistic Minimalism (2006), Bare Syntax (2008), Language in Cognition (2009), Syntactic Islands (2012), Elementary Syntactic Structures (2014), Reflections on Language Evolution (2021), and the editor of numerous volumes, most recently, the Oxford Handbook of Approachoes to Language Evolution. He serves as Principal Investigator of the "Cognitive Biology of Language" research group. Elected member of the Academia Europaea.
Research interests
My current research focuses on developing new ways to shed light on the neurobiological foundations of the human language faculty. My graduate training and early career were in theoretical linguistics, but my more recent work has a more explicit biological, and experimental orientation. My current projects are all intended to facilitate integration among disciplines (linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and genetics), and lead to better experimental testing of theoretical hypotheses, as well as to more solid interpretations of experimental findings. I also seek to exploit the full pluralism characteristic of the life sciences to force a rethinking of long-held assumptions in theoretical linguistics and other domains of cognitive science.
Selected publications
- Boeckx C 2025. Language: A special cognitive gadget. Physics of Life Reviews 52:21-22
- Caporale N, Leonardi O, Vila CE, Vitriolo A, Boeckx C & Testa G. 2025. Tile by tile: capturing the evolutionary mosaic of human conditions. Current Opinion in Genetics and Development 90:102297
- Frölich M, Boeckx C & Tennie C 2025. The Role of Exploration and Exploitation in Shaping Great Ape Communication. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 292: 20241665.
- Raviv L & Boeckx C 2025, The Oxford Handbook of Approaches to Language Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.