The irregularities of language are obvious in contrasts like fall and fell, stand and stood, be, am, is, was and were. These are often taken to be ‘the grammar’. But there are hidden dimensions in regularities and universals which are not obvious at all. By the framework and the proposal here, these universals are hidden by the way human speech and language have evolved. They are manifest in the way children learn speech and language today. This is commonly referred to as ‘Universal Grammar’ or UG. By the proposal here, the evolution and acquisition of UG involves a continuous series of highly-specific steps.

Some of the hidden regularities are first confronted by language learners in questions they hear with who, what, where and other such words, pronounced at one position in the structure, on the left edge, and understood somewhere else in the structure. This sort of displacement appears to be universal.

A four year old on his or her first day at school may be asked “Who do you want to play with?” or “Who do you want to play with you?” In one sense, they mean much the same. But in the underlying structures, who relates to different elements in different positions. So competent speakers understand the two questions in correspondingly different ways. In “Who does she want to play with?” she is the would-be player. In “Who does she want to play with her?” the would-be player is anyone but she. Although the difference is by only by one final word, the onus in any response is quite different in each case. A child might seem to respond appropriately to questions of this sort without making the analysis of a fully competent adult speaker. Such a full analysis involves putting together two of the principles which the child first starts to master much earlier – typically in the first three years, by the proposal here.

Words like who are copied from various positions in the structure other than those where they are eventually pronounced. Forcibly there is a derivation. This is not taught in school. Nor could it be. But native speakers of English understand the principles of this derivation accurately and reliably and without a word of instruction.

The grammar on this point involves not one, but five sorts of universal.

• By what is known as ‘case’, in English, as in most languages, a difference is markes between she and her in “Who does she want to play with her?”
• By what is known as ‘person’ the  reference here is to anybody other than the speaker nor the listener,
• By what is known as number, she is differentiated from they. Number and person are both features of the meaning, reflected in whether do is said as does.
• By what used to be known as ‘inflection’ and is now mostly known as ‘Tense’, in  “Who does she want to play with?” and “Who did she want to play with?” do and did specify different time planes of reference.
• By the contrast between words used as nouns like horror, as adjectives like horrible, as verbs like horrify, and elements known as ‘functors’ whose only role is in relation to one or more other parts of the structure like the in ‘the horror’ and that in “I think that he’s horrible”. All languages divide their words into these two main categories, functors on the one hand and what are traditionally known as ‘parts of speech’ or ‘lexical items’ in the framework here, on the other.

Universals

The notion of UG is supported a great deal of evidence. It is reflected by a series of commonalities across diverse languages. In 1965 Chomsky proposed that UG was specified by the human genome. For some reason, this idea has been steadfastly resisted or ridiculed ever since by many who have no problem with other seemingly innate human-specific capacities like our ability to carry out mathematical operations, or the implications of Florence Goodenough’s 1926 ‘Draw a man test’ (still widely used) interpreting two dots for eyes, a vertical line for a nose, a horizontal line for a mouth, and an enclosing circle for a head.

Those who deny that there is any such thing as UG struggle to explain universals such as the distinction between functors and lexical categories which do not easily reduce to human or communicative need.

If there is no such thing as UG, the notion of language disorder is ultimately not definable. So there can be no well-grounded scientific investigation of the condition or well-motivated treatment for it.

But if there is anything like a genetic UG, it is not just possible, but likely, that this natural endowment varies slightly across individual members of the species. Any one or more of these universals may be problematic for some children. At least some aspects of these variations surface as speech and language disorders of varying degrees of severity. If a child has a problem of this sort, he or she may need help. The child’s apparent awarenss of such universals is a sensitive diagnostic. Some of these problems resolve spontaneously in the course of childhood. But some persist throughout life as a’communication problem’.

In relation to UG, there are many discernible positions. By the simplest position, first proposed by Chomsky (1995), there is a single overarching functionality which he calls ‘Merge’, by which the whole of grammatical structure is built from one cyclical process of merging two elements and characterising one as the defining property of the Merge, and then merging this with another element, and so on, recursively. On the most complex account, proposed by Stephen Pinker in 1994, there is an extremely rich ‘Language Instinct’, as he proposes in his book by that name. On a simpler account, proposed by Ray Jackendoff (2002) now endorsed by Pinker, there is a network of 13 functionalites which the learner has to traverse in order to reach full competence. By another model, due to Naama Friedmann, Adriana Belletti and Luigi Rizzi (2021), there are just three key functionalies. By the proposal here, there are seven steps, all defined in a single format, reflecting the broad shape of the original evolutionary process.

UG distinctly characterises the framework here. They are part of a universally available apparatus. The simplest explanation of the universality is that, as by Chomsky’s 1965 proposal, it is specified by the human genome. In more recent work, he defines the universality almost entirely on the single function of Merge.