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Universal Grammar? Or prerequisites for natural language?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

Adele E. Goldberg
Adele E. Goldberg
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540. adele@princeton.eduhttp://www.princeton.edu/~adele
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Abstract

This commentary aims to highlight what exactly is controversial about the traditional Universal Grammar (UG) hypothesis and what is not. There is widespread agreement that we are not born “blank slates,” that language universals exist, that grammar exists, and that adults have domain-specific representations of language. The point of contention is whether we should assume that there exist unlearned syntactic universals that are arbitrary and specific to Language.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 31 , Issue 5 , October 2008 , pp. 522 - 523
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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