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The search for the ‘neural code’ in animal neurophysiology has recently seen a marked transition from the analysis of individual spike timings to larger patterns of synchronisation, and it will be argued that the study of language should readily embrace these systems-level developments in the field. An emerging consensus in linguistics is that the language system needs to exploit two memory workspaces in order to generate and maintain/interpret non-local syntactic relations (e.g. Adger, 2017). One workspace is used to construct syntactic phrases, and the other is used to maintain these units. The findings of a number of MEG studies will be discussed in order to suggest that an initial phase-amplitude coupling θ-γ code constitutes the first workspace, and a subsequently embedded δ-θ code constitutes the second. It will be shown that this account goes some way to explain why leftinferior frontal regions seem sensitive to syntactic violations, and why anterior temporal regions seem to be implicated in semantic composition operations. If the particular δ-θ interactions documented here are indeed humanspecific, this could derive the apparent uniqueness of the dual workspace of human syntax. δ appears vital for language comprehension, but from a neurocomputational perspective, cross-frequency coupling involving δ may also play a vital role in the online construction of phrases, instead of ‘passively’ entraining to phrasal units (Ding et al., 2016). Although cross-frequency coupling is most commonly found between θ and γ, recent work suggests that θ entrains to δ in the human brain in a uniquely diverse way (Maris et al., 2016). Given experimental findings that these slow rhythms entrain to sentential and phrasal structures (Mai et al., 2016; Bradley & Iverson, 2017), the discovery of humanspecific forms of δ-θ phase-amplitude coupling is potentially of great significance; in particular when interpreted alongside findings that non-human primate call systems exhibit limited cross-frequency couplings, as shown in Murphy (2016a-c, Forthcoming a,b). Grimaldi (2017: 17) summarises that ‘Murphy [(2016b)] proposes a revolutionary theory of neurolinguistics ... that 335

A domesticated code: On the emergence of the oscillatory basis of phrase structure