general cognitive mechanisms and communicative functions To articulate universal principles and provide ... identify recursion as a cognitive universal , not a linguistic one. And in that case it is difficult to see how ... 2005, Lødrup 2006, among others), reflect relative frequency instead of categorical grammaticality (Labov ... externalists emergentists essentialists Primary phenomena Actual utterances as produced by language users Facts of social cognition, interaction, and communication Intuitions of grammaticality and literal meaning Primary subject matter Language use; structural properties of expressions and languages Linguistic communication, cognition, variation, and change Abstract universal principles that explain the properties of specific languages Aim To describe attested expression structure and interrelations, and predicting properties of unattested expressions To explain structural properties of languages in terms of general cognitive mechanisms and communicative functions To articulate universal principles and provide explanations for deep and cross-linguistically constant linguistic properties Linguistic structure A system of patterns, inferrable from generally accessible, objective features of language use A system of constructions that range from fixed idiomatic phrases to highly abstract productive types A system of abstract conditions that may not be evident from the experience of typical language users Values Accurate modeling of linguistic form that accords with empirical data and permits prediction concerning unconsidered cases Cognitive, cultural, historical, and evolutionary explanations of phenomena found in linguistic communication systems Highly abstract, covering-law explanations for properties of language as inferred from linguistic intuitions Children’s language A nascent form of language, very different from adult linguistic competence A series of stages in an ontogenetic process of developing adult communicative competence Very similar to adult linguistic competence though obscured by cognitive, articulatory, and lexical limits What is acquired A grasp of the distributional properties of the constituents of expressions of a language A mainly conventional and culturally transmitted system for linguistic communication An internalized generative device that characterizes an infinite set of expressions Table 1. Bybee and McClelland put it this way: One common view is that language has an essential and unique inner structure that conforms to a universal ideal, and what people say is a potentially imperfect reflection of this inner essence, muddied by performance factors. According to an opposing view…language use has a major impact on language structure. The experience that users have with language shapes cognitive representations, which are built up through the application of general principles of human cognition to linguistic input. Many generative Essentialist theorists had been suggesting that violation of different universal principles led to different degrees of unacceptability. According to Bard et al. (34–35), because there may be “disproportion between the fineness of judgments people can make and the symbol set available for recording them” it will not suffice to use some fixed scale such as this one: ? < ?? < ?* < * < ** indicating absolute degrees of unacceptability. Degrees of relative unacceptability must be measured. This is done by asking the informant how much less acceptable one string is than another. For example, Phillips discounts the observation of Schütze (1996) that conflicting judgments of relative unacceptability of violations of two linguistic universals held back the development of Government and Binding (GB), on the grounds that two sets of conflicting judgments and their analyses “are now largely forgotten, supplanted by theories that have little to say about such examples.” But the fact that the proposed universals are discarded principles of UG is irrelevant to the effect that unreliable data once had on the (now largely abandoned) GB theory. They often seriously underestimate the space of grammatical possibility (Taylor 1994, 1996, Bresnan & Nikitina 2003, Fellbaum 2005, Lødrup 2006, among others), reflect relative frequency instead of categorical grammaticality (Labov 1996, Lapata 1999, Manning 2003), overlook complex constraint interactions (Green 1971, Gries 2003) and processing effects (Arnon et al. 2005a, b), and fail to address the problems of investigator bias (Labov 1975, Naro 1980, general nativists linguistic nativists Languages are acquired mainly through the exercise of defeasible inductive methods, based on experience of linguistic communication Language cannot be acquired by defeasible inductive methods; its structural principles must to a very large degree be unlearned The unlearned capacities that underpin language acquisition constitute a uniquely human complex of non-linguistic dispositions and mechanisms that also subserve other cognitive functions In addition to various broadly language-relevant cognitive and perceptual capacities, language acquisition draws on an unlearned system of ‘universal grammar’ that constrains language form Various non-human animal species may well have most or all of the capacities that humans use for language acquisition—though no non-human species seems to have the whole package, so interspecies differences are a matter of degree There is a special component of the human mind which has the development of language as its key function, and no non-human species has anything of the sort, so there is a difference in kind between the abilities of humans and other animals Table 3: General and linguistic nativism contrasted There does not really seem to be anyone who is a complete non-nativist: nobody really thinks that a creature with no unlearned capacities at all could acquire a language.

languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind. The field originates from discussions influenced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of a universal grammar, but was largely pioneered by… Noam Chomsky's work related to the innateness hypothesis as it pertains to our ability to rapidly learn any language without formal instruction and with limited input, or what he refers to as a poverty of the stimulus, is what began research into linguistic universals. This led to his proposal for a shared underlying grammar structure for all languages, a concept he called universal grammar (UG), which he claimed must exist somewhere in the human brain prior to language acquisition. Chomsky defines UG as "the system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages... by necessity." He states that UG expresses "the essence of human language," and believes that the structure-dependent rules of UG allow humans to interpret and create an infinite number of novel grammatical sentences. Chomsky asserts that UG is t A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind. The field originates from discussions influenced by Noam Chomsky's proposal of a universal grammar, but was largely pioneered by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, who derived a set of forty-five basic universals, mostly dealing with syntax, from a study of some thirty languages. Though there has been significant research into linguistic universals, in more recent time some linguists, including Nicolas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson, have argued against the existence of absolute linguistic universals that are shared across all languages. These linguists cite problems such as ethnocentrism amongst cognitive scientists, and thus linguists, as well as insufficient research into all of the world's languages in discussions related to linguistic universals, instead promoting these similarities as simply strong tendencies. Noam Chomsky's work related to the innateness hypothesis as it pertains to our ability to rapidly learn any language without formal instruction and with limited input, or what he refers to as a poverty of the stimulus, is what began research into linguistic universals. This led to his proposal for a shared underlying grammar structure for all languages, a concept he called universal grammar (UG), which he claimed must exist somewhere in the human brain prior to language acquisition. Chomsky defines UG as "the system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages... by necessity." He states that UG expresses "the essence of human language," and believes that the structure-dependent rules of UG allow humans to interpret and create an infinite number of novel grammatical sentences. Chomsky asserts that UG is the underlying connection between all languages and that the various differences between languages are all relative with respect to UG. He claims that UG is essential to our ability to learn languages, and thus uses it as evidence in a discussion of how to form a potential 'theory of learning' for how humans learn all or most of our cognitive processes throughout our lives. The discussion of Chomsky's UG, its innateness, and its connection to how humans learn language has been one of the more covered topics in linguistics studies to date. However, there is division amongst linguists between those who support Chomsky's claims of UG and those who argued against the existence of an underlying shared grammar structure that can account for all languages.