Introducing a Type-theoretical Approach to Universal Grammar

The idea of Universal Grammar (UG) as the hypothetical linguistic structure shared by all human languages harkens back at least to the 13th century. The best known modern elaborations of the idea are due to Chomsky. Following a devastating critique from theoretical, typological and field linguistics, these elaborations, the idea of UG itself and the more general idea of language universals stand untenable and are largely abandoned. The presentation shows how to tackle the hypothetical structure of UG in a framework very different from the Chomskyan ones, using dependent and polymorphic type theory. The expected outcome of this work in progress is a versatile logic for expressing natural language morphosyntax and compositional semantics.