I want to attach linguistics to the reductionist stack of disciplines that forms modern science.   Linguistics is simply an example of rather complex animal behavior, which must eventually be explained by neurobiology.   Neurobiology is, of course, explained by cell biology, and so forth.

We’d like this explanation to preserve the basic linguistic assumptions, such as that language is expressible as an ordered string of discrete entities (such as syllables or words), which might have continuous properties attached (like relative importance).