Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T02:38:47.465Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Universal Grammar? Or prerequisites for natural language?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Adele E. Goldberg
Adele E. Goldberg
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540. [email protected]://www.princeton.edu/~adele
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This commentary aims to highlight what exactly is controversial about the traditional Universal Grammar (UG) hypothesis and what is not. There is widespread agreement that we are not born “blank slates,” that language universals exist, that grammar exists, and that adults have domain-specific representations of language. The point of contention is whether we should assume that there exist unlearned syntactic universals that are arbitrary and specific to Language.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 31 , Issue 5 , October 2008 , pp. 522 - 523
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bates, E. (1993) Modularity, domain specificity and the development of language. Technical Report No. 9305. Center for Research in Language, UCSD.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Deacon, T. W. (1997) The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain. W. W. Norton/Penguin.Google Scholar
de Saussure, F., (1916/1959) Course in general linguistics, trans. Baskin, W., 1959 edition.Philosophical Library.Google Scholar
Ellis, N. C. (2002) Frequency effects in language processing: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24(2):143–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elman, J. L., Bates, E. A., Johnson, M. H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D. & Plunkett, K. (1996) Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Enfield, N. J. (2002) Ethnosyntax. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. E. (2006) Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N. & Fitch, W. T. (2002) The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298(5598):1569–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Newmeyer, F. J. (2005) Possible and probable languages: A generative perspective on linguistic typology. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, S. & Jackendoff, R. (2005) The faculty of language: What's special about it? Cognition 95(2):201–36.Google Scholar