What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?

Abstract

Universal Grammar (UG) is a suspect concept. There is little agreement on what exactly is in it; and the empirical evidence for it is very weak. This paper critically examines a variety of arguments that have been put forward as evidence for UG, focussing on the three most powerful ones: universality (all human languages share a number of properties), convergence (all language learners converge on the same grammar in spite of the fact that they are exposed to different input), and poverty of the stimulus (children know things about language which they could not have learned from the input available to them). I argue that these arguments are based on premises which are either false or unsubstantiated. Languages differ from each other in profound ways, and there are very few true universals, so the fundamental crosslinguistic fact that needs explaining is diversity, not universality. A number of recent studies have demonstrated the existence of considerable differences in adult native speakers’ knowledge of the grammar of their language, including aspects of inflectional morphology, passives, quantifiers, and a variety of more complex constructions, so learners do not in fact converge on the same grammar. Finally, the poverty of the stimulus argument presupposes that children acquire linguistic representations of the kind postulated by generative grammarians; constructionist grammars such as those proposed by Tomasello, Goldberg and others can be learned from the input. We are the only species that has language, so there must be something unique about humans that makes language learning possible. The extent of crosslinguistic diversity and the considerable individual differences in the rate, style and outcome of acquisition suggest that it is more promising to think in terms of a language-making capacity, i.e., a set of domain-general abilities, rather than an innate body of knowledge about the structural properties of the target system.

The Inhibitory Mechanism in Learning Ambiguous Words in a Second Language

“…Children have long been shown to have problems in learning the multiple meanings of polysemous words (Slobin, 1985; Merriman et al, 1989; Mazzocco, 1997; Woodward and Markman, 1998; Doherty, 2004). For example, Doherty (2004) investigated children’s ability to learn a new meaning for a known word, i.e., a pseudo-homonym.…”

Language change and language evolution: Cousins, siblings, twins?

“…Harris 1993 on the history of this divide and Gong 2011 as well as Pleyer & Hartmann 2019 for discussions on how the debate can potentially be resolved). Recent years have seen a short-lived resurgence of the "linguistics wars" in the wake of Evans' (2014) almost viciously polemic rebuttal of generative theory that led to a back and forth of reply articles (Adger 2015a;Behme and Evans 2015;Adger 2015b; for a more nuanced perspective, despite the slightly sardonic title, see Dąbrowska 2015). In historical linguistics, the generative-functionalist divide mainly pertains to assumptions regarding the loci of change (language acquisition vs. language use; see Hartmann 2018: 24-29).…”

“…For instance, not even the fiercest proponent of cognitive linguistics would deny that at least the cognitive prerequisites of language have a biological basis (see e.g. Dąbrowska 2015). In addition, there is increasing convergence between generative and usage-based linguistics regarding methodology.…”

Functionally Equivalent Variants in a Non-standard Variety and Their Implications for Universal Grammar: A Spontaneous Speech Corpus

“…Falsification should be understood as subjecting these contents to analysis that confirms or disconfirms our current theory about them. The issue of falsification is important because linguists that question UG have often highlighted in their criticisms the ‘unfalsifiability’ argument (Dabrowska, 2015; Lin, 2017 and references therein). If a theory makes no falsifiable claims, it is an unscientific theory (Popper, 1959), and indeed it would be worrying if a theory of UG involved no falsifiable predictions.…”