The Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar [Illustrated] 0199573778, 9780199573776

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

 

OXFOR D HANDBOOKS IN LINGUISTICS Recently Published

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The Oxford Handbook of

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR Edited by

IAN ROBERTS

1

 

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © editorial matter and organization Ian Roberts 2017 © the chapters their several authors 2017 The moral rights of the authors‌have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number:  2016944780 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​957377–​6 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

 

This book is dedicated to Noam Chomsky, il maestro di color che sanno.

 

 

Preface

The idea for this volume was first proposed to me by John Davey several years ago. Its production was delayed for various reasons, not least that I was chairman of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages in Cambridge for the period 2011–​2015. I’d like to thank the authors for their patience and, above all, for the excellence of their contributions. I’d also like to thank Julia Steer of Oxford University Press for her patience and assistance. Finally, thanks to the University of Cambridge for giving me sabbatical leave from October 2015, which has allowed me to finalize the volume, and a special thanks to Bob Berwick for sending me a copy of Berwick and Chomsky (2016) at just the right moment. Oxford, February 2016

 

 

Contents

List of Figures and Tables  List of Abbreviations  The Contributors  1. Introduction  Ian Roberts

xi xiii xvii 1

PA RT I   P H I L O S OP H IC A L BAC KG ROU N D 2. Universal Grammar and Philosophy of Mind  Wolfram Hinzen

37

3. Universal Grammar and Philosophy of Language  Peter Ludlow

61

4. On the History of Universal Grammar  James McGilvray

77

PA RT I I   L I N G U I ST IC  T H E ORY 5. The Concept of Explanatory Adequacy  Luigi Rizzi

97

6. Third-​Factor Explanations and Universal Grammar  Terje Lohndal and Juan Uriagereka

114

7. Formal and Functional Explanation  Frederick J. Newmeyer

129

8. Phonology in Universal Grammar  Brett Miller, Neil Myler, and Bert Vaux

153

9. Semantics in Universal Grammar  George Tsoulas

183

 

x   Contents

PA RT I I I   L A N G UAG E AC Q U I SI T ION 10. The Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus  Howard Lasnik and Jeffrey L. Lidz

221

11. Learnability  Janet Dean Fodor and William G. Sakas

249

12. First Language Acquisition  Maria Teresa Guasti

270

13. The Role of Universal Grammar in Nonnative Language Acquisition  289 Bonnie D. Schwartz and Rex A. Sprouse

PA RT I V   C OM PA R AT I V E  SY N TAX 14. Principles and Parameters of Universal Grammar  C.-​T. James Huang and Ian Roberts

307

15. Linguistic Typology  Anders Holmberg

355

16. Parameter Theory and Parametric Comparison  Cristina Guardiano and Giuseppe Longobardi

377

PA RT V   W I DE R  I S SU E S 17. A Null Theory of Creole Formation Based on Universal Grammar  Enoch O. Aboh and Michel DeGraff

401

18. Language Change  Eric Fuß

459

19. Language Pathology  Ianthi MariaTsimpli, Maria Kambanaros, and Kleanthes K. Grohmann

486

20. The Syntax of Sign Language and Universal Grammar  Carlo Cecchetto

509

21. Looking for UG in Animals: A Case Study in Phonology  Bridget D. Samuels, Marc D. Hauser, and Cedric Boeckx

527

References  Index of Authors  Index of Subjects

547 627 639

 

List of Figures and Tables Figures 10.1 The red balls are a subset of the balls. If one is anaphoric to ball, it would be mysterious if all of the referents of the NPs containing one were red balls. Learners should thus conclude that one is anaphoric to red ball.

246

10.2 Syntactic predictions of the alternative hypotheses. A learner biased to choose the smallest subset consistent with the data should favor the one = N0 hypothesis. 

246

16.1 A sample from Longobardi et al. (2015), showing 20 parameters and 40 languages. The full version of the table, showing all 75 parameters, can be found at www.oup.co.uk/companion/roberts.  

382

16.2 Sample parametric distances (from Longobardi et al. 2015) between the 40 languages shown in Figure 16.1. The full version of the figure showing all parametric distances can be found at www.oup.co.uk/companion/ roberts.  388 16.3 A Kernel density plot showing the distribution of observed distances from Figure 16.2 (grey curve), observed distances between cross-​family pairs from Figure 16.2 (dashed-line curve), and randomly-​generated distances (black curve). From Longobardi et al. (2015).

390

16.4 KITSCH tree generated from the parametric distances of Figure 16.2.

391

19.1 Impairment of communication for speech, language, and pragmatics. 

488

19.2 A minimalist architecture of the grammar. 

494

Tables 13.1 Referential vs. bound interpretations for null vs. overt pronouns in Kanno (1997). 

298

14.1 Summary of values of parameters discussed in this section for English, Chinese, and Japanese.

318

19.1 Classification of aphasias based on fluency, language understanding, naming, repetition abilities, and lesion site (BA = Brodmann area).

501

 

 

List of Abbreviations

AS

Autonomy of Syntax

ASC

autism spectrum conditions

ASD

autism spectrum disorders

ASL

American Sign Language

BCC

Borer–​Chomsky Conjecture

CALM combinatory atomism and lawlike mappings CCS

Comparative Creole Syntax

CL

Cartesian Linguistics

CRTM Computational-​Representational Theory of Mind DGS

German Sign Language

DP Determiner Phrase ECM

Exceptional Case Marking

ENE

Early Modern English

EST

Extended Standard Theory

FE

Feature Economy

FL

language faculty

FLB

Faculty of Language in the Broad sense

FLN

Faculty of Language in the Narrow sense

FOFC

Final-​Over-​Final Constraint

GA

genetic algorithm

GB

Government and Binding

HC Haitian Creole HKSL

Hong Kong Sign Language

IG

Input Generalization

L1

first language, native language

L2

second language

L2A

Second Language Acquisition

LAD

Language Acquisition Device

 

xiv   List of Abbreviations LCA

Linear Correspondence Axiom

LF Logical Form LH

left hemisphere

LI lexical item LIS

Italian Sign Language

LSF

French Sign Language

ME

Middle English

MGP Modularized Global Parametrization MnC Modern Chinese MP

Minimalist Program

NE

Modern English

OC

Old Chinese

OCP

Obligatory Contour Principle

OT Optimality Theory P&P

Principles and Parameters

PCM Parametric Comparison Method PF Phonological Form PFF

pleiotropic formal features

PLD

Primary Linguistic Data

PP prepositional phrase QUD question under discussion RBP

Rule-​Based Phonology

SAI

Subject–​Auxiliary Inversion

SCM

structural case marking

SLI

specific language impairment

SMT

Strong Minimalist Thesis

SO syntactic object STM

short-​term memory

SVC

Single Value Constraint

TİD

Turkish Sign Language

TLA

Triggering Learning Algorithm

TMA Tense, Mood, and Aspect TP

transitional probabilities

TSM

Taiwanese Southern Min

 

List of Abbreviations    xv TVJT truth value judgment task UFS

Universal Feature Set

UG

Universal Grammar

VL

variational learning

WM working memory

 

 

The Contributors

Enoch O. Aboh is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, where he investigates the learnability of human language with a special focus on comparative syntax, language creation, and language change. His main publications include The Emergence of Hybrid Grammars (2015) and The Morphosyntax of Head–​Complement Sequences (2004). As a co-​organizer of the African Linguistics School, where he also teaches, he is strongly engaged in working toward a better transfer of knowledge of linguistics to Africa. Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), and a member of the section of General Linguistics at the Universitat de Barcelona, as well as the Center for Complexity Science at the same university. He is the author of numerous books, including Islands and Chains (2003), Linguistic Minimalism (2006, OUP), Bare Syntax (2008, OUP), Language in Cognition (2010, Wiley-​Blackwell), and Elementary Syntactic Structures (2014, CUP). He is the editor of OUP’s Studies in Biolinguistics series. Carlo Cecchetto is a graduate of the University of Milan and has held posts in Siena and Milan. He is currently Directeur de recherche at CNRS (UMR 7023, Paris VIII). He has published two monographs, has edited several collections of articles and has co-​ authored over 40 articles in academic journals on topics ranging from natural language syntax and semantics to sign language and the neuropsychology of language. Michel DeGraff is Professor of Linguistics at MIT and Director of the ‘MIT–​Haiti Initiative’ funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. He is also a founding member of Haiti’s Haitian Creole Academy. He studies Creole languages, focusing on his native Haitian Creole. His research deepens our understanding of the history and structures of Creole languages. His analyses show that Creole languages, often described as ‘exceptional’ or ‘lesser,’ are fundamentally on a par with non-​Creole languages in terms of historical development, grammatical structures, and expressive capacity. His research projects bear on social justice as well. In DeGraff ’s vision, Creole languages and other so-called ‘local’ languages constitute a necessary ingredient for sustainable development, equal opportunity, and dignified citizenship for their speakers—​a position that is often undermined by theoretical claims that contribute to the marginalization of these languages, especially in education and administration. Janet Dean Fodor has a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT, and has taught at the University of Connecticut as well as at the City University of New York, where she is Distinguished

 

xviii   The Contributors Professor at The Graduate Center. She is the author of a textbook on semantics and of a 1979 monograph republished recently in Routledge Library Editions. Her research—​in collaboration with many students and colleagues—​includes studies of human sentence processing in a variety of languages, focusing most recently on the role of prosody in helping (or hindering) syntactic analysis, including the ‘implicit prosody’ that is mentally projected in silent reading. Another research interest, represented in this volume, is the modeling of grammar acquisition. She was a founder of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, now in its 29th year. She is a former president of the Linguistic Society of America and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Eric Fuß graduated from the Goethe University Frankfurt and has held positions at the Universities of Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Leipzig. He is currently Senior Researcher at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany. He has written three monographs and (co-​)edited several volumes of articles. His primary research interests are language change, linguistic variation, and the interface between syntax and morphology. Kleanthes K. Grohmann received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and is currently Professor of Biolinguistics at the University of Cyprus. He has published widely in the areas of syntactic theory, comparative syntax, language acquisition, impaired language, and multilingualism. Among the books he has written and (co-​)edited are Understanding Minimalism (with N. Hornstein and J. Nunes, 2005, CUP), InterPhases (2009, OUP), and The Cambridge Handbook of Biolinguistics (with Cedric Boeckx, 2013, CUP). He is founding co-​editor of the John Benjamins book series Language Faculty and Beyond, editor of the open-​access journal Biolinguistics, and Director of the Cyprus Acquisition Team (CAT Lab). Cristina Guardiano is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia. She specialized in historical syntax at the Università di Pisa, where she got her Ph.D., with a dissertation about the internal structure of DPs in Ancient Greek. She is active in research on the parametric analysis of nominal phrases, the study of diachronic and dialectal syntactic variation, crosslinguistic comparison, and phylogenetic reconstruction. She is a member of the Syntactic Structures of the World's Languages (SSWL) research team, and a project advisor in the ERC Advanced Grant ‘LanGeLin’. Maria Teresa Guasti is a graduate of the University of Geneva and has held posts in Geneva, Milano San Raffaele, and Siena. She is currently Professor of Linguistics and Psycholinguistics at the University of Milano-​Bicocca. She is author of several articles in peer-​reviewed journals, of book chapters, one monograph, one co-​authored book, and one second-edition textbook. She is Associate Investigator at the ARC-​CCD, Macquarie University, Sydney and Visiting Professor at the International Centre for Child Health, Haidan District, Beijing. She has participated in various European Actions and has been Principal Investigator of the Crosslinguistic Language Diagnosis project funded by the European Community.

 

The Contributors   xix Marc D. Hauser is the President of Risk-​Eraser, LLC, a company that uses cognitive and brain sciences to impact the learning and decision making of at-​risk children, as well as the schools and programs that support them. He is the author of several books, including The Evolution of Communication (1996, MIT Press), Wild Minds (2000, Henry Holt), Moral Minds (2006), and Evilicious (2013, Kindle Select, CreateSpace), as well as over 250 publications in refereed journals and books. Wolfram Hinzen is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies and Research (ICREA) and is affiliated with the Linguistics Department of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He writes on issues in the interface of language and mind. He is the author of the OUP volumes Mind Design and Minimal Syntax (2006), An Essay on Names and Truth (2007), and The Philosophy of Universal Grammar (with Michelle Sheehan, 2013), as well as co-​editor of The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality (OUP, 2012). Anders Holmberg received his Ph.D. from Stockholm University in 1987 and is currently Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at Newcastle University, having previously held positions in Morocco, Sweden, and Norway. His main research interests are in the fields of comparative syntax and syntactic theory, with a particular focus on the Scandinavian languages and Finnish. His publications include numerous articles in journals such as Lingua, Linguistic Inquiry, Theoretical Linguistics, and Studia Linguistica, and several books, including (with Theresa Biberauer, Ian Roberts, and Michelle Sheehan) Parametric Variation: Null Subjects in Minimalist Theory (2010, CUP) and The Syntax of Yes and No (2016, OUP). C.-​T. James Huang received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1982 and has held teaching positions at the University of Hawai’i, National Tsing Hua University, Cornell University, and University of California before taking up his current position as Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He has published extensively, in articles and monographs, on subjects in syntactic analysis, the syntax–​semantics interface, and parametric theory. He is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, an academician of Academia Sinica, and founding co-​editor of Journal of East Asian Linguistics (1992–​present). Maria Kambanaros, a certified bilingual speech pathologist with 30 years clinical experience, is Associate Professor of Speech Pathology at Cyprus University of Technology. Her research interests are related to language and cognitive impairments across neurological and genetic pathologies (e.g., stroke, dementia, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, specific language impairment, syndromes). She has published in the areas of speech pathology, language therapy, and (neuro)linguistics, and directs the Cyprus Neurorehabilitation Centre. Howard Lasnik is Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, where he has also held the title Distinguished Scholar-​Teacher. He is Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and serves on the editorial boards of eleven journals. He has published eight books and over 100 articles, mainly on syntactic theory,

 

xx   The Contributors learnability, and the syntax–​semantics interface, especially concerning phrase structure, anaphora, ellipsis, verbal morphology, Case, and locality constraints. He has supervised 57 completed Ph.D. dissertations, on morphology, on language acquisition, and, especially, on syntactic theory. Jeffrey L. Lidz is Distinguished Scholar-​Teacher and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland. His main research interests are in language acquisition, syntax, and psycholinguistics and his many publications include articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cognition, Journal of Memory and Language, Language Acquisition, Language Learning and Development, Language, Linguistic Inquiry, and Natural Language Semantics, as well as chapters in numerous edited volumes. He is currently editor in chief of Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics and is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics. Terje Lohndal is Professor of English Linguistics (100%) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and Professor II (20%) at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2012. His work focuses on formal grammar and language variation, but he also has interests in philosophy of language and neuroscience. He has published a monograph with Oxford University Press, and many papers in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry, Journal of Semantics, and Journal of Linguistics. In addition to research and teaching, Lohndal is also involved with numerous outreach activities and is a regular columnist in Norwegian media on linguistics and the humanities. Giuseppe Longobardi is Anniversary Professor of Linguistics at the University of York and Principal Investigator on the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant ‘Meeting Darwin’s last challenge: Toward a global tree of human languages and genes’ (2012–​2017). He has done research in theoretical and comparative syntax, especially on the syntax/​ontology relation in nominal expressions. He is interested in quantitative approaches to language comparison and phylogenetic linguistics, and is active in interdisciplinary work with genetic anthropologists. Over the past ten years he has contributed the design of three innovative research programs (Topological Mapping theories, Parametric Minimalism, and the Parametric Comparison Method). Peter Ludlow has published on a number of topics at the intersection of the philosophy of language and linguistics. His publications include The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics (OUP, 2011)  and Living Words:  Meaning Underdetermination and the Dynamic Lexicon (OUP, 2014). He has taught at State University of New York at Stony Brook, University of Michigan, University of Toronto, and Northwestern University. James McGilvray is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal. He has published articles in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind and has written and edited several books and articles on the works of Noam Chomsky and their philosophical, moral, and scientific foundations and implications. He is currently editing a second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky focusing primarily on change and progress in Chomsky’s work during the last ten years.

 

The Contributors   xxi Brett Miller is Visiting Professor at the University of Missouri–​Columbia. His interests include the role of phonetics in explaining the behaviors of phonological features; historical phonology, especially where laryngeal contrasts are concerned; and pragmatic functions of syntax in Ancient Greek. He also enjoys teaching linguistic typology and the history of the English language. Neil Myler is Assistant Professor of linguistics at Boston University. He received his doctorate from New York University in 2014, under the supervision of Prof. Alec Marantz, with a thesis entitled ‘Building and Interpreting Possession Sentences.’ His research interests include morphosyntax, morphophonology, microcomparative syntax (particularly with respect to English dialects and languages of the Quechua family), argument structure, and the morphosyntax and semantics of possession cross-​linguistically. Frederick J. Newmeyer specializes in syntax and the history of linguistics and has as his current research program the attempt to synthesize the results of formal and functional linguistics. He was Secretary-​treasurer of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) from 1989 to 1994 and its President in 2002. He has been elected Fellow of the LSA and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2011 he received a Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Emeritus Faculty. Luigi Rizzi teaches linguistics at the University of Geneva and at the University of Siena. He was on the faculty of MIT and the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). His research interests involve theoretical and comparative syntax, with special reference to the theory of locality, the study of syntactic invariance and variation, the cartography of syntactic structures, and the theory-​guided study of language acquisition. His main publications include the monographs Issues in Italian Syntax and Relativized Minimality, and the article ‘The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery.’ Ian Roberts is a graduate of the University of Southern California and has held posts in Geneva, Bangor, and Stuttgart. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He has published six monographs and two textbooks, and has edited several collections of articles. He was president of Generative Linguistics of the Old World (GLOW) in 1993–​2001, and of the Societas Linguistica Europeea in 2012–​2013. He is currently Principle Investigator on the European Reserach Council Advanced Grant Rethinking Comparative Syntax. William G. Sakas has an undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the City University of New York (CUNY). He is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Computer Science at Hunter College and is on the doctoral faculties of Linguistics and Computer Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is the Co-founding Director of the Computational Linguistics Masters and Doctoral Certificate Program. He has recently become active in computer science education both at the college and pre-​college levels. His research focuses on computational modeling of human language: What are the consequential components of a computational model and how do they correlate with psycholinguistic data and human mental capacities?

 

xxii   The Contributors Bridget D. Samuels is Senior Editor at the Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology, University of Southern California. She is the author of Phonological Architecture: A Biolinguistic Perspective (2011, OUP), as well as numerous other publications in biological, historical, and theoretical linguistics. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University in 2009 and has taught at Harvard, the University of Maryland, and Pomona College. Bonnie D. Schwartz is Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai‘i. Her research has examined the nature of second language acquisition from a generative perspective. More recently, she has focused on child second language acquisition and how it may differ from that of adults. Rex A. Sprouse received his Ph.D. in Germanic linguistics from Princeton University. He has taught at Bucknell University, Eastern Oregon State College, and Harvard University and is now Professor of Second Language Studies at Indiana University. In the field of generative approaches to second language acquisition, he is perhaps best known for his research on the L2 initial state and on the role of Universal Grammar in the L2 acquisition of properties of the syntax–​semantics interface. Ianthi Maria Tsimpli is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She works on language development in the first and second language in children and adults, language impairment, attrition, bilingualism, language processing, and the interaction between language, cognitive abilities, and print exposure. George Tsoulas graduated from Paris VIII in 2000 and is currently Senior Lecturer at the University of York. He has published extensively on formal syntax and the syntax–​ semantics interface. He has edited and authored books on quantification, distributivity, the interfaces of syntax with semantics and morphology and diachronic syntax. His work focuses on Greek and Korean syntax and semantics, as well as questions and the integration of syntax with gesture. He is currently working on a monograph on Greek particles. Juan Uriagereka has been Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland since 2000. He has held visiting professorships at the universities of Konstanz, Tsukuba, and the Basque country. He is the author of Syntactic Anchors: On Semantic Structure and of Spell-​Out and the Minimalist Program, and co-​author, with Howard Lasnik, of A Course in Minimalist Syntax. He is also co-​editor, with Massimo Piattelli-​Palmarini and Pello Salaburu, of Of Minds and Language. Bert Vaux is Reader in phonology and morphology at Cambridge University and Fellow of King’s College. He is primarily interested in phenomena that shed light on the structure and origins of the phonological component of the grammar, especially in the realms of psychophonology, historical linguistics, microvariation, and nanovariation. He also enjoys working with native speakers to document endangered languages, especially varieties of Armenian, Abkhaz, and English.

 

Chapter 1

Introdu c t i on Ian Roberts

1.1 Introduction Birds sing, cats meow, dogs bark, horses neigh, and we talk. Most animals, or at least most higher mammals, have their own ways of making noises for their own purposes. This book is about the human noise-​making capacity, or, to put it more accurately (since there’s much more to it than just noise), our faculty of language. There are very good reasons to think that our language faculty is very different in kind and in consequences from birds’ song faculty, dogs’ barking faculty, etc. (see Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002, ­chapter 21 and the references given there). Above all, it is different in kind because it is unbounded in nature. Berwick and Chomsky (2016:1) introduce what they refer to as the Basic Property of human language in the following terms: ‘a language is a finite computational system yielding an infinity of expressions, each of which has a definite interpretation in semantic-​pragmatic and sensorimotor systems (informally, thought and sound).’ Nothing of this sort seems to exist elsewhere in the animal kingdom (see again Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002). Its consequences are ubiquitous and momentous: Can it be an accident that the only creature with an unbounded vehicle of this kind for the storage, manipulation, and communication of complex thoughts is the only creature to dominate all others, the only creature with the capacity to annihilate itself, and the only creature capable of devising a means of leaving the planet? The link between the enhanced cognitive capacity brought about by our faculty for language and our advanced technological civilization, with all its consequences good and bad for us and the rest of the biosphere, is surely quite direct. Put simply, no language, then no spaceships, no nuclear weapons, no doughnuts, no art, no iPads, or iPods. In its broadest conception, then, this book is about the thing in our heads that brought all this about and got us—​and the creatures we share the planet with, as well as perhaps the planet itself—​where we are today.

 

2   Ian Roberts

1.1.1 Background The concept of universal grammar has ancient pedigree, outlined by Maat (2013). The idea has its origins in Plato and Aristotle, and it was developed in a particular way by the medieval speculative grammarians (Seuren 1998:30–37; Campbell 2003:84; Law 2003:158–​168; Maat 2013:401) and in the 17th century by the Port-​Royal grammarians under the influence of Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology (Arnauld and Lancelot 1660/​1676/​1966). Chomsky (1964:16–​25, 1965, c­ hapter 1, 1966/​2009, 1968/​ 1972/​2006, chapter 1) discusses his own view of some of the historical antecedents of his ideas about Universal Grammar (UG henceforth) and other matters, particularly in 17th-​century Cartesian philosophy; see also ­chapter 4. Arnauld and Lancelot’s (1660/​1676/​1966) Grammaire générale et raisonnée is arguably the key text in this connection and is discussed—​from slightly differing perspectives—​in ­chapters 2 and 4, and briefly here. The modern notion of UG derives almost entirely from one individual:  Noam Chomsky. Chomsky founded the approach to linguistic description and analysis known as generative grammar in the 1950s and has developed that approach, along with the related but distinct idea of UG, ever since. Many others, among them the authors of several of the chapters to follow, have made significant contributions to generative grammar and UG, but Chomsky all along has been the founder, leader, and inspiration. The concept of UG initiated by Chomsky can be defined as the scientific theory of the genetic component of the language faculty (I give a more detailed definition in (2) below). It is the theory of that feature of the genetically given human cognitive capacity which makes language possible, and at the same time defines a possible human language. UG can be thought of as providing an intensional definition of a possible human language, or more precisely a possible human grammar (from now on I will refer to the grammar as the device which defines the set of strings or structures that make up a language; ‘grammar’ is therefore a technical term, while ‘language’ remains a pre-​theoretical notion for the present discussion). This definition clearly provides a characterization of a central and vitally important aspect of human cognition. All the evidence—​above all the qualitative differences between human language and all known animal communication systems (see Hauser 1996; Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002; and c­ hapter 21)—​ points to this being a cognitive capacity that only humans (among terrestrials) possess. This capacity manifests itself in early life with little prompting as long as the human child has adequate nutrition and its other basic physical needs are met, and if it is exposed to other humans talking or signing (see c­ hapters 5, 10, and, in particular, 12). The capacity is universal in the sense that no putatively human ethnic group has ever been encountered or described that does not have language (modalities other than speech or sign, e.g., writing and whistling, are known, but these modalities convey what is nonetheless recognizably language; see Busnel and Classe 1976, Asher and Simpson 1994 on whistled languages). Finally, there is evidence that certain parts of the brain (in particular Broca’s area, Brodmann areas 44 and 45) are centrally involved with language, but crucial aspects of the neurophysiological instantiation of language in the  brain ­

 

Introduction   3 are poorly understood. More generally in this connection there is the problem of understanding how abstract computational representations and information flows can be in any way instantiated in brain tissue, which they must be, on pain of committing ourselves to dualism—​see c­ hapter 2, Berwick and Chomsky (2016:50) and the following discussion. For all these reasons, UG is taken to be the theory of a biologically given capacity. In this respect, our capacity for grammatical knowledge is just like our capacity for upright bipedal motion (and our incapacity for ultraviolet vision, unaided flight, etc.). It is thus species-​specific, although this does not imply that elements of this capacity are not found elsewhere in the animal kingdom; indeed, given the strange circumstances of the evolution of language (on which see Berwick and Chomsky 2016; and section 1.6), it would be surprising if this were not the case. Whether the human capacity for grammatical knowledge is domain-​specific is another matter; see section 1.1.2 for discussion of how views on this matter have developed over the past thirty or forty years. In order to avoid repeated reference to ‘the human capacity for linguistic knowledge,’ I will follow Chomsky’s practice in many of his writings and use the term ‘UG’ to designate both the biological human capacity for grammatical knowledge itself and the theory of that capacity that we are trying to construct. Defined in this way, UG is related to but distinct from a range of other notions: biolinguistics, the faculty of language (both broad and narrow as defined by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002), competence, I-​language, generative grammar, language universals and metaphysical universals. I will say more about each of these distinctions directly. But first a distinct clarification, and one which sheds some light on the history of linguistics, and of generative grammar, as well as taking us back to the 17th-​century French concept of grammaire générale et raisonnée. UG is about grammar, not logic. Since antiquity, the two fields have been seen as closely related (forming, along with rhetoric, the trivium of the medieval seven liberal arts). The 17th-​century French grammarians formulated a general grammar, an idea we can take to be very close to universal grammar in designating the elements of grammar common to all languages and all peoples; in this their enterprise was close in spirit to contemporary work on UG. But it was different in that it was also seen as rational (raisonnée); i.e., reason lay behind grammatical structure. To put this a slightly different—​ and maybe tendentious—​way: the categories of grammar are directly connected to the categories of reason. Grammar (i.e., general or universal grammar) and reason are intimately connected; hence, the grammaire générale et raisonnée is divided into two principal sections, one dealing with grammar and one with logic. The idea that grammar may be understood in terms of reason, or logic, is one which has reappeared in various guises since the 17th century. With the development of modern formal logic by Frege and Russell just over a century ago, and the formalization of grammatical theory begun by the American structuralists in the 1930s and developed by Chomsky in the 1950s (as well as the development of categorial grammars of various kinds, in particular by Adjukiewicz 1935), the question of the relation between formal logic and formal grammar naturally arose. For example, Bar-​Hillel (1954) suggested

 

4   Ian Roberts that techniques directly derived from formal logic, especially from Carnap (1937 [1934]) should be introduced into linguistic theory. In the 1960s, Montague took this kind of approach much further, using very powerful logical tools and giving rise to modern formal semantics; see the papers in Montague (1974) and the brief discussion in section 1.3. Chomsky’s view is different. Logic is a fine tool for theory construction, but the q ­ uestion of the ultimate nature of grammatical categories, representations, and other c­ onstructs—​ the question of the basic content of UG as a biological object—​is an empirical one. How similar grammar will turn out to be to logic is a matter for investigation, not decision. Chomsky made this clear in his response to Bar-​Hillel, as the following quotation shows: The correct way to use the insights and techniques of logic is in formulating a general theory of linguistic structure. But this does not tell us what sort of systems form the subject matter for linguistics, or how the linguist may find it profitable to describe them. To apply logic in constructing a clear and rigorous linguistic theory is different from expecting logic or any other formal system to be a model for linguistic behavior (Chomsky 1955:45, cited in Tomalin 2008:137).

This attitude is also clear from the title of Chomsky’s Ph.D. dissertation, the foundational document of the field: The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (Chomsky 1955/​ 1975). Tomalin (2008:125–​139) provides a very illuminating discussion of these matters, noting that Chomsky’s views largely coincide with those of Zellig Harris in this respect. The different approaches of Chomsky and Bar-​Hillel resurfaced in yet another guise in the late 1960s in the debate between Chomsky and the generative semanticists, some of whom envisaged a way to once again reduce grammar to logic, this time with the technical apparatus of standard-​theory deep structure and the transformational derivation of surface structure by means of extrinsically ordered transformations (see Lakoff 1971, Lakoff and Ross 1976, McCawley 1976, and section 1.1.2 for more on the standard theory of transformational grammar). In a nutshell, and exploiting our ambiguous use of the term ‘UG’: UG as the theory of human grammatical knowledge must depend on logic; just like any theory of anything, we don’t want it to contain contradictions. But UG as human grammatical knowledge may or may not be connected to any given formalization of our capacity for reason; that is an empirical question (to which recent linguistic theory provides some intriguing sketches of an answer; see ­chapters 2 and 9). Let us now look at the cluster of related but largely distinct concepts which surround UG and sometimes lead to confusion. My goal here is above all to clarify the nature of UG, but at the same time the other concepts will be to varying degrees clarified. Biolinguistics.  One could, innocently, take this term to be like ‘sociolinguistics’ or ‘psycholinguistics’ in simply designating where the concerns of linguistics overlap with those of another discipline. Biolinguistics in this sense is just those parts of linguistics (looking at it from the linguist’s perspective) that overlap with biology. This overlap area presumably includes those aspects of human physiology that are directly connected to language, most obviously the vocal tract and the structure of the ear (thinking of sign language, perhaps also the physiology of manual gestures and our visual capacity to

 

Introduction   5 apprehend them), as well as the neural substrate for language in the brain. It may also include whatever aspects of the human genome subserve language and its development, both before and after birth. Furthermore, it may study the phylogenetic development of language, i.e., language evolution. In recent work, however, the term ‘biolinguistics’ has come to designate the approach to the study of the language faculty which, by supposing that human grammatical knowledge stems in part from some aspect of the human genome, directly grounds that study in biology. Approaches to UG (in both senses) of the kind assumed here are thus biolinguistic in this sense. But we can, for the sake of clarity, distinguish UG from biolinguistics. On the one hand, one could study biolinguistics without presupposing a common human basis for grammatical knowledge: basing the study of language in biology does not logically entail that the basic elements of grammar are invariant and shared by all humans, still less that they are innate. Language could have a uniquely human biological basis without any particular aspect of grammar being common to all humans; in that case, grammar would not be of any great interest for the concerns of biolinguistics. This scenario is perhaps unlikely, but not logically impossible; in fact, the position articulated in Evans and Levinson (2009) comes close to this, although these authors emphasize the role of culture rather than biology in giving rise to the general and uniquely human aspects of language. Conversely, one can formulate a theory of UG as an abstract Platonic object with no claim whatsoever regarding any physical instantiation it may have. This has been proposed by Katz (1981), for example. To the extent that the technical devices of the generative grammars that constitute UG are mathematical in nature, and that mathematical objects are abstract, perhaps Platonic, objects, this view is not at all incoherent. So we can see that biolinguistics and UG are closely related concepts, but they are logically and empirically distinct. Combining them, however, constitutes a strong hypothesis about human cognition and its relation to biology and therefore has important consequences for our view of both the ontogeny and phylogeny of language. UG is also distinct from the more general notion of faculty of language. This distinction partly reflects the general difference between the notions of ‘grammar’ and ‘language,’ although the non-​technical, pre-​theoretical notion of ‘language’ is very hard to pin down, and as such not very useful for scientific purposes. UG in the sense of the innate capacity for grammatical knowledge is arguably necessary for human language, and thus central to any conception of the language faculty, but it is not sufficient to provide a theoretical basis for understanding all aspects of the language faculty. For example, one might take our capacity to make computations of a Gricean kind regarding our interlocutor’s intentions (see Grice 1975) as part of our language faculty, but it is debatable whether this is part of UG (although, interestingly, such inferences are recursive and so may be quite closely connected to UG). In a very important article, much-​cited in the chapters to follow, Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002) distinguish the Faculty of Language in the Narrow sense (FLN) from the Faculty of Language in the Broad sense (FLB). They propose that the FLB includes all aspects of the human linguistic capacity, including much that is shared with other

 

6   Ian Roberts species: ‘FLB includes an internal computational system (FLN, below) combined with at least two other organism-​internal systems, which we call “sensory-​motor” and “conceptual-​intentional” ’ (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002:1570); ‘most, if not all, of FLB is based on mechanisms shared with nonhuman animals’ (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002:1572). FLN, on the other hand, refers to ‘the abstract linguistic computational system alone, independent of the other systems with which it interacts and interfaces’ (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002:1570). This consists in just the operation which creates recursive hierarchical structures over an unbounded domain, Merge, which ‘is recently evolved and unique to our species’ (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002:1572). Indeed, they suggest that Merge may have developed from recursive computational systems used in other cognitive domains, for example, navigation, by a shift from domain-​specificity to greater domain-​generality in the course of human evolution (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002:1579). UG is arguably distinct from both FLB and FLN. FLB may be construed so as to include pragmatic competence, for example (depending on one’s exact view as to the nature of the conceptual-​intentional interface) and so the point made earlier about pragmatic inferencing would hold. More generally, Chomsky’s (2005) three factors in language design relate to FLB. These are: (1) Factor One: the genetic endowment, UG. Factor Two: experience, Primary Linguistic Data for language acquisition (PLD). Factor Three: principles not specific to the faculty of language/​non-​domain-​specific optimization strategies and general physical laws. (See in particular ­chapter 6 for further discussion.) In this context, it is clear that UG is just one factor that contributes to FLB (but see Rizzi’s (this volume) suggested distinction beteen ‘big’ and ‘small’ UG, discussed in section 1.1.2). If FLN consists only of Merge, then presumably there is more to UG since more than just Merge makes up our genetically given capacity for languge (e.g., the status of the formal features that participate in Agree relations in many minimalist approaches may be both domain-​specific and genetically given; see section 1.5). Picking up on Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch’s final suggestion regarding Merge/​FLN, the conclusion would be that all aspects of the biologically given human linguistic capacity are shared with other creatures. What is specific to humans is either the fact that all these elements uniquely co-​occur in humans, or that they are combined in a particular way (this last point may be important for understanding the evolution of language, as Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch point out—​see also Berwick and Chomsky 2016:157–​164 and section 1.6 for a more specific proposal). Competence.  The competence/​performance distinction was introduced in Chomsky (1965:4) in the following well-​known passage: Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-​listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-​community, who knows its [the speech community’s] language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as

 

Introduction   7 memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance.

So competence represents the tacit mental knowledge a normal adult has of their native language. As such, it is an instantiation of UG. We can think of UG along with the third factors as determining the initial state of language acquisition, S0, presumably the state it is in when the individual is born (although there may be some in utero language acquisition; see ­chapter 12). Language acquisition transits through a series of states S1 … Sn whose nature is in some respects now quite well understood (see again ­chapter 12). At some stage in childhood, grammatical knowledge seems to crystallize and a final state SS is reached (here some of the points made regarding non-​native language acquisition in ­chapter 13 are relevant, an