"Things await us that we cannot now imagine"

2014/06/01 Galarraga Aiestaran, Ana - Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Anatomia/Fisiologia
• Giza zientziak
• Elkarrizketak

The research is unmistakable. Therefore, since I started linguistics, eleven things have happened that have fascinated me. I find it impossible to choose one. However, there are some milestones, and one of them is the reason why I became a linguist, since in fact it was because of the literature that had put me to study philology. But I began to read the writings of a thinker called Chomsky, and the things he said fascinated me. For example, language is the activity of our desire; today it seems evident to us, but then there was no such vision. I, however, was deeply fascinated by this affirmation and, consequently, I started to go towards linguistics.

Somehow I secretly did to the linguist, on the one hand I studied career issues in the faculty and, on the other, I read on my own those who interested me. At the end of the race, Pello Salaburu came from MIT and was surprised by the number of questions he had. It is then when we started to know these ideas in the career, and it is then when I got into linguistics.

Another milestone is that there is a real convergence between linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists. There is still a lot missing, but it is happening. And it has already been recognized that language is part of cognitive neuroscience and that the contribution of linguistics is not baladí. I don't think I've been fascinated, but it's a milestone that has influenced my research career. In fact, when Chomsky said that the language is in our brain, linguistics went on one side and experimental sciences on the other were two different galaxies. I remember taking a MIT brochure on aphasia. I was hallucinated: I didn't know there could be diseases related to language, they didn't even talk to us in the race. In recent years, however, vision has changed and we collaborate with neuroscientists and psychologists.

I'm sure we will now learn things about the language we don't imagine. Things await us that we cannot now imagine. For example, 10-15 years ago the relationship between cognition and body was not expected to be so close. In English it is called embodied cognition, and although it is much broader than linguistics, things that have already been found in linguistics are being reaffirmed. However, it is no more than an example. So what do I expect? Well, things I don't imagine, I always hope, and it's not a nonsense in the journey I had since I became a linguist, because I've seen that things that seemed unthinkable are true.