The Interplay between Universal Grammar , Universals , and Lineage Specificity

The prominent publication of Dunn, Greenhill, Levinson, and Gray's (DGLG) (2011) article in Nature, together with the associated media attention, gives typologists and theoreticians a welcome opportunity to clarify and debate what we mean by universals, and what evidence one should expect to find for or against such universals. In these remarks, I take advantage of this opportunity from a formal-generative-Chomskian perspective. It is well-known that within the Chomskian research tradition the central theoretical notion has not been " (language) universal " but rather " universal grammar ". This has been consistently defined over many years as whatever knowledge or biases human children use to interpret the linguistic data they experience, contributing to the shape of the linguistic knowledge they end up with when they mature (Chomsky 1965, Chomsky 1981). This is assumed to be essentially uniform across the human species, apart from genetic abnormalities (e.g., Specific Language Impairment); hence the " universal " in " universal grammar ". This assumption of universality can be justified empirically quite apart from any results of typological research per se. It is grounded by the simple fact—uncontested as far as I know—that children from all genetic stocks seem to acquire indistinguishable competence in whatever language they grow up being exposed to. For example, living in the suburban USA, it is easy to observe children from