Gramatica Universal

Universal grammar and the innateness

hypothesis.

Sverker Johansson

University of Lund, Sweden

17-Jan-1991

Abstract

A critical study of the arguments for and against the hypothesis that human beings are born

with an innate universal grammar, with some brief discussions of alternative theories.

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1 Introduction

The issues of whether, and to what extent, language may be innate in humans,

and if there are any universal features underlying the bewildering multitude of

human languages, have always been debated among the students of language.

A few decades ago, a more coherent and explicit version of the innateness hypothesis

was proposed, with Noam Chomsky as the principal spokesman. This

hypothesis postulates the existence in the human brain of a “Language Acquisition

Device”, equipped from birth with the set of linguistic rules that form

the “Universal Grammar”, grammatical rules which are common to all human

languages.

The innateness hypothesis is still highly controversial among linguists, with

some echoes of the “nature vs. nurture” debates that have plagued other

branches of human sciences. In this essay, I will attempt to critically study

some of the arguments for and against innateness.

2 Universal grammar

There are two main approaches to the question of language universals — either

in-depth studies of one or a few languages, which is basically Chomsky’s method,

or wide-range typological comparisons of a large number of languages, a method

favoured by, among others, Greenberg.

Quite naturally, the two approaches have a tendency to generate different

types of universal rules. Greenbergian rules are often on the form “If a language

has feature A, then it is likely to have also feature B.” Chomskian rules are of

a more abstract and structural character, and are claimed to be strictly universal,

rather than just tendencies. Since the innateness hypothesis is intimately

connected with the Chomskian paradigm, only this category of universals will

be further discussed here.

Chomsky himself has written many books on this topic, such as (1978),

(Chomsky, 1978; Chomsky, 1986; Chomsky, 1982). This presentation is, however,

based not so much on Chomsky’s own writings as on the introduction to his

work written by Cook (Cook, 1988) (containing another 20 Chomsky references

for those who are interested).

Universal grammar is defined by Chomsky as “the system of principles, conditions,

and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages. . . the

essence of human language” (Chomsky, 1978).

Cook gives a few examples of rules that supposedly belong to this universal

grammar :

• Structure dependency. All operations on sentences are defined in terms

of phrase structure, rather than e.g. linear sequence. This is probably

the least controversial of all the proposed rules of universal grammar,

being strongly supported both by all available data, and by most people’s

linguistic intuition.

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• The Head parameter. Each phrase contains a “head” (main word),

and all phrases in a given language have the head in the same position.

The head position is, however, different from language to language, which

introduces the important concept of a parameter-governed rule. Unfortunately

it is not too difficult to find exceptions to this rule — for example,

the two English noun phrases “high court” and “court martial” have the

heads at opposite ends — weakening the case for including it in a universal

grammar.

• The Projection principle. Properties of lexical entries project onto the

structure of the phrases of which they are the head. This rule ensures

e.g. that a verb gets the appropriate number and type of objects. The

universality of this rule is far from self-evident — it is strongly dependent

upon a particular grammatical theory (Government & Binding), in which

the lexicon carries much of the linguistic information that could otherwise

be expressed as phrase structure rules. Some equivalent of the projection

principle may be needed, but it might look completely different if another

theory of grammar were used.

There are several more universal-grammar rules proposed by Chomsky, and

presumably the full set of rules required by the innateness hypothesis is rather

large. But it would take us too far to go into more detail here.

3 The innateness hypothesis

At one level, it is self-evident that there has to be some innate component in

our language acquisition — other animals normally don’t acquire language, and

the difference between them and us is to a large extent innate.

But the Chomskian innateness hypothesis is more specific. It postulates not

only a general ability in humans to acquire language, but also that this our

ability comes from a specific language-acquisition device in the brain, equipped

already at birth with specific grammatical rules and principles.

The main arguments in favour of the innateness hypothesis are :

• Language acquisition would be difficult or even impossible without an innate

grammar: “How do we come to have such rich and specific knowledge,

or such intricate systems of of belief and understanding, when the evidence

available to us is so meager ?” (Chomsky, quoted in (Cook, 1988).)

• The mere existence of language universals support the hypothesis that

these are innate.

• Essentially all humans acquire language, and no other animals do.

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4 Language acquisition — some other models.

The innateness hypothesis is far from the only available explanation of language

acquisition. A multitude of different hypotheses have been proposed at one

time or another; Cruttenden (Cruttenden, 1979) classifies them in four main

categories :

• Behaviourist

• Innatist

• Cognitive

• Sociological

The innatist models were discussed in the preceding section, the others will

be briefly touched upon below.

4.1 Behaviourist models

Behaviourism is a prominent school within general psychology, and some of

its proponents, notably Skinner (Skinner, 1957), have attempted to set up behaviourist

models for language

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