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FLUG-BrainHeart

The Faculty of Language and Universal Grammar

A faculty and a grammar

Where UG succeeds and sometimes fails

Understandings of UG

 

A faculty and a grammar

Both of the ideas here are contentious. This website is predicated on the assumption that both ideas are real. But the balance between them is subtle. The interpretations of these ideas here are my own – broad in comparison to to some other understandings.

In a loose sense, the thinking here is quite ancient. One aspect of the universality was first noticed by Marcus Terentius Varro 2,000 years ago, and then by Roger Bacon who put the matter more explicitly over 1,200 years later: “Grammar is one and the same in all languages, substantially, though it may vary, accidentally, in each of them.” Then, 700 years after Bacon, Noam Chomsky developed the idea a great deal further.

In one sense, the faculty of language is obvious. Human beings can talk. In every human language, there are ways of saying:

  • I like her.
  • Does he like her?
  • She doesn’t like him.
  • Who does she like?
  • Go away!
  • I think she likes me.
  • You see I think she likes me.

In every human society the overwhelming majority of the population progress naturally and without any special help to a clear, reliable, exact understanding of all the contrasts here. Without this understanding there would no sense in the notion of either law or comedy.

By the faculty of language, we can use exactly the same words in the same tone of voice, but meaning something seemingly opposite, or at least quite different, in irony or absurd exaggeration, and hopefully be understood according to our intended meaning. That understanding depends on a degree of mental synergy. So where there is no synergy, the reversal can be misunderstood. Or perhaps wishing to deny any synergy whatsoever, the listener can deny any understanding, as in the process of making an arrest. In such a scenario, comedy is apt to play badly.

But the richness of the faculty here depends on very precise mechanisms. These, by the framework here, are universal. There are significant variations in the operation of these mechanisms from one language to another, but not in the basic principles involved. Hence the notion of Universal Grammar, commonly known as UG.

There are those, like Michael Tomasello, who dispute that there is any such thing as UG, that the whole of human grammar can be attributed to human culture. But this makes it hard to explain the commonalities across different grammars, most intensely studied by Julie Anne Legate.

UG is like the heart, pumping blood with its essential oxygen up to the brain, allowing the brain to operate.

By the proposal here, the key universality is a function which I call ‘Geometrical Merge’, an extension of Noam Chomsky’s Merge, going back further in human evolution and giving a more complete account of children’s language acquisition.

Where UG succeeds and sometimes fails

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. Any apparent unawareness of such universals is a sensitive diagnostic.

One such unawareness was uncovered by Carol Chomsky (1969). She discovered that not only were some ten year olds, unable to respond appropriately to instructions like “Ask your friend what to feed the tortoise”, but so were some adults. This may be an index of what is sometimes characterised as a ‘communication problem’.

Understandings of UG

In relation to UG, there are many discernible positions. By the simplest position, proposed by Chomsky and others (2023), there is a single operation which they call ‘Merge’, by which the whole of grammar is built by merging two elements 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 points 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 steps. By the proposal here, there are seven steps, involving sharper and sharper restrictions on the scope of the lexical searching at any given point in the derivation.

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 on Merge. By the proposal here, the universality has to be defined in a more complex way.