Yes, It implies the language process and determine human language

definitely not. look up any work on infant development (e.g., in developmental cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, dynamic systems), and you'll see how limited UG is in terms of explanatory and predictive power. It was a clever hypothesis when it was first proposed, but it should have been abandoned decades ago. I remember that Dorothy Bishop nicely sums up why on her blog post - BishopBlog, Look it up.

Hi Gary. I am in the process of writing a PhD in Philosophy which, while addressing the need for a change in the philosophy underpinning learning, also touches upon the question of Universal Grammar. This section is in rough form but I can send it to you once it is ready. Keep well. Ewa

Well, Gary, I don´t understand what you mean by grammar: For me any grammar should show the way how the meaning of an expression can arise from the meanings of particular subexpressions. Unless grammarians begin to collaborate with some logicians the project cannot be realized. But besides, is the project really independent of the trivial fact that there are many (oh! how many!) different languages?

Some thoughts could be inspired by reading Duží, Jespersen, Materna: Procedural Semantics for Hyperintensional Logic, Springer 2010...

At least Gary, UG showed the innate human language introduced by Chomsky even though he's no longer discuss about syntax. but the tendency nowadays people would like to use Systemic Functional.

I don't believe in an "innate" human language. I don't think anyone who has studied how language emerges or how neural and cognitive processes develop more generally, in children (especially in infants) would say that there is an "innate" human language, except perhaps Baillergeon and Spelke. See Elman et al - Rethinking Innateness.

If anything, there are "innate" biases that constrain the emerge of higher level functions, including the acquisition of things like language. But no UG anywhere. The problem - as I see it - is that people use UG to explain linguistic phenomena that occurs in adults. This is a neat (albeit overly simplistic) explanation of common human language structures. But surely, these adult researchers should use UG to explain how these phenomena arise in the first place - i.e., in children? And if they can't - then maybe they're barking up the wrong tree? Maybe it's a neat theory that (despite being simple and neat) actually isn't what happens in the real world?

Imagine the set of all particular grammars, let it be G, A universal grammar could be the function from G to particular languages. Do you like it? I don´t.

No. I don't think Universal Grammar is the answer to understanding language. As a Saussurean linguist, I believe that understanding natural languages (not formal or artificial ones) requires that we appreciate linguistic - and therefore cultural - diversity. Because every single act of language is unique and determined by the textual, social, cultural, and historical context that surrounds it, extracting some sort of universal structure can only be done at the cost of losing (ignoring) all of this specificity. In fact, I believe that universal grammars are ethnocentric at best because they are claiming to describe something that does not change from person to person, context to context, based on the study of a small selection languages and language activities. Stripping away its cultural specificity is essentially ignoring language as it is in its natural state. Even if some deeper, more universal form can be identified within a given corpus, they will only de-contextualized artefacts of language constructed by the linguist or the philosopher. As Francois Rastier likes to remind us language is only as deep as its surface: in other words, the richness, complexity, power of language resides in its manifestation, it's so-called surface structures which are always unique - not in a universal grammar.

Anat Ninio (2011) goes so far as to write: " … Mainstream theoretical linguistics has just undergone a revolutionary change, turning upside down all our presuppositions on what exactly children are supposed to be developing when they learn to generate grammatical sentences."

“ … If at the start of the scientific study of language development, usually counted from the seminal publications of the 1960s, it was taken for granted that adult syntax is organized somewhere along the lines of Chomsky's Standard Theory (1957, 1965), consisting of abstract phrase-structure rules, deep structure and surface structure, and transformations mapping the one to the other, at present, practically nothing has remained in Chomskian theorizing from all that. For an empiricist like myself, this is good news… His thinking about syntax has come up with a version that, [ she refers to the minimalist program and the Merge function]…, allows children to actually learn syntax from the language addressed to them by their parents and others in their environment.” (p.11).

and Christiansen & Chater (2010): "Current conceptions of UG vary considerably in

terms of what is genetically specified, ranging from a set of universal linguistic principles

with associated parameters in Principles and Parameter Theory (e.g., Crain, Goro, & Thornton,

2006; Crain & Pietroski, 2006), to a language-specific ‘‘toolkit’’ that includes structural

principles relating to phrase structure (X-bar theory), agreement, and case-marking in Simpler

Syntax (Culicover & Jackendoff, 2005; Pinker & Jackendoff, 2009), to the intricate

recursive machinery that implements Merge within the Minimalist Program (e.g., Boeckx,

2006; Chomsky, 1995). However, despite the important theoretical differences between current

approaches to UG, they all share the central assumption that the core components of

UG, whatever their form, are fundamentally arbitrary, from the standpoint of building a system

for communication. Thus, the abstract properties of UG do not relate to communicative

or pragmatic considerations, nor from limitations on the mechanisms involved in using or

acquiring language, or any other functional sources. Indeed, it has been argued that many

aspects of UG may even hinder communication (e.g., Chomsky, 2005; Lightfoot, 2000),

further highlighting the nonfunctional nature of UG.", ...

A fundamental problem with UG -- along with many theories that oppose it – is the "naturalization" language, treating it as an evolutionary, biological phenomenon. So many debates revolve around whether or not UG actually corresponds to genetic evolution or neuronal activity, as though language were only a result of biology. What we really need to be doing is treating language as a cultural phenomenon. Language doesn't originate in our brain. We are "born into it". It is already there culturally and historically. We are born to learn it. Yes. But to say that we are born equipped with a brain pre-disposed with or for a universal grammar is essentially denying linguistic & cultural diversity. Language, like culture in general, does not follow evolutionary time either; it follows historical time, which is something altogether different. Nature and culture or not antonyms here; they are simply different levels of organization and complexity. I believe that our understanding of language is weakened by the reduction of language to biology. From a cultural point of view, we would we say that there is a “universal cultural” to which all cultures can be reduced to or from which they can be drawn?

Another thing that is often ignored in this debate is the fact that UG is all about Grammar, when in fact, language is also a textual , rhetorical, and hermeneutic process – neither of which can be accounted for in terms of grammar. Most importantly, language must be seen as something that goes way beyond the sentence. The true emprical object of linguistics is the text (oral or written), which in turn must be seen as one with its context – otherwise we’re dealing with a de-contextualized – and therefore impoverished - linguistics. What is really turning linguistics on its head today is the shift away from the logico-grammatical paradigm to a rhetorical-hermeneutic one. I'm writing all this because I believe that viewing language as grammar has reached an impass, and it does not bring us closer to understanding how meaning is actually made in context, which is where language actually happens.

For a serious re-consideration of the relation between biological evolution and language, you should consult the first article listed below (Unfortunately, it can only be found in French at this time).

(1) Rastier, F. “Naturalisation et culturalisation”. In L'évolution aujourd'hui : à la croisée de la biologie et des sciences humaines : actes du colloque des 29, 30 et 31 janvier 2009 à l'Académie royale de Belgique

(2) Rastier, F. “Passages and Path within the Intertext” In Mellet, Sylvie and Dominique Longrée (eds.), New Approaches in Text Linguistics. 2009. 214 pp. (pp. 7–29)

(3) Rastier, F, Cavazza, M, and A. Abeille. Semantics for Descriptions: From Linguistics to Computer Science

(4) Rastier, F. Semantics and Cognitive Research [e-book: http://www.revue-texto.net/Parutions/Livres-E/Rastier_SCR/Sommaire.html]

(5) Rastier, F. Meaning and Textuality . U of Toronto P. 1997

(6) Saussure, F. Writings in General Linguistics. Bouquet, S., Engler, R. Sanders, C. and Pires, M., Eds. Oxford Linguistics. 2006

@Andrew Silletti:

There are groups of people who do not have language. The reason why there seems to be a critical period for language is because of something called interactive specialisation (see perceptual narrowing). But the point I was making was somewhat different: We humans are born with the same "biases" that help us to acquire things like language very easily. That's why almost all humans develop language.

I once asked Renee Baillargeon why she thought language was innate. She said she felt it was innate because it is ubiquitous. In other words, people from all around the world develop language. But this is not a good enough reason. Because we all share roughly the same environments and thus have similar problems to solve, and hence we come up with similar solutions to solve these problems. To give a silly example that just popped into my head (because I just saw an advert), if giant monsters (or lots of Godzillas) suddenly appeared in New York, London, the Borneo forest, the Russian steppes, the Australian outback, the Amazon rainforest, and Ural mountains, even though no one was born with a module to deal with this specific problem, do you think that the people in the different regions would behave differently? Based on what we know about the human, I think everyone would act in a very similar way: they would grab their families and run off in fear, and hope that someone else (e.g., the warriors and leaders of their communities) would deal with the problem! In other words, we have evolved certain biases, some of these biases may lead us to come up with very similar solutions to the exact same problems. In other words, there are constraints that make certain solutions much much much more likely than other solutions. The interesting thing to me is identifying all the different constraints, not in assuming that there is a pre-existing module that somehow solves a very complex problem.

I agree that biology (the mind, the body, evolution, genetics) constrains and influences how we acquire language and culture. Language is after all only possible because it is supported by the physical and mental worlds. But the reverse is also true: language and culture constrains and influence biology & nature (e.g., reproduction rituals, agriculture, the sentencing of a death penalty, etc.). The brain and body we are born with are not the CAUSE of language, but they are predisposed to learn it (and therefore constrain it to some extent).

The important thing is to recognize the relative autonomy of the semiotic sphere (linguistics in this case). In this way, we can better appreciate the relationship between language and biology/nature, between language and cognition, between language and the world. Unfortunately, cognitive linguists reduce language to a mere instrument of thought, or a window to thought (Pinker, Jackendoff), thereby ignoring the autonomy of the semiotic dimension - our semiotic and cultural inheritance. They have essentially ignored what Saussure tried to tell us hundred years ago.

Saussure's stroke of genius was the distinction between the CONCEPT (in the world of mental representations) and the SIGNIFIED (in language). Thanks to this, language is seen as autonomous, and we can now better appreciate the relationship between different autonomous layers of our experiences ( i.e., the semiotic (linguistic), the cognitive, the neurological, the physical, etc.) rather than reducing them to each other.

I agree with Andrew Silletti when he says, "The interesting thing to me is identifying all the different constraints, not in assuming that there is a pre-existing module that somehow solves a very complex problem." I think it is more interesting to find new problems and complexities (i.e., diversity). It's more useful for understanding human language which is entirely built out of differences.

Hi again.

Andrew, I wouldn't like to take over the whole string here. Yet, I invite you to see the whole paper, if you like: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262107469_Deconstructing_the_Universal_Grammar_through_More_Speculation?ev=prf_pub

Reading William above, I find something missing: our closest predecessors in evolution did not use language -- not that we know, for that matter. Also, surely we evolved such a costly faculty for the better, out of natural selection. Tomasello, for instance, contends that an interplay between culture and biology would be behind this all, the former pushing changes in the latter.

It would've happened this way: big pimates at some point started to cooperate more and more, giving from the self out to the group -- probably, because they found that this was in turn more beneficial for themselves. Now, that change in attitude was advantageous for the self, and that is when biology and natural selection kicked in. Less communicative individuals did not make it through. For the rest, the days of communication had only started.

Next would come more and greater gestures, signalling, pointing. More elaboration, to the point of recursion. Yet more collaboration. And at some point, their tools at hand (quite literally!) -- namely, hand & arm gestures -- became insufficient for all the communication they wanted. It had to get more elaborated. So at some point, the smartest brothers in the family started to notice that the 'tool' they used to use for less elaborated, intuitive calls, i.e., the vocal tract, was in fact very flexible. It allowed for pitch and volume variation, but also for slight changes in the structure of calls. Those slight changes would become greater and greater; and combined with the ability for recursion -- which they had already developed in their gestures -- would give way to language as we know it, or something close.

Now, how that very first historical language -- a protolanguage -- relates to the 7,000 languages we know of today... that is a much easier story than the one above, methinks.

When we talk of universal grammar it starts from our Birth .We all know that men are born equal under difference parent with different environment & social fabrics .Birth start from the arrival under crying invitation with the smiles of a mother .Mother in joyful atmosphere starts talking with the child in her own language & with the passage of some time child starts talking by calling loving word for mother & father & to me this is the begining of universal grammar.

Universal grammar can not become the part & parcel of encyclopedia as it has reflection of entire human being of our Global which has a connection with our cosmic environment Every world utters become a sound in our universal which has become the basic essential of the creative forces of universal .

When the world with the association with the sound as an importants in universal grammar & for his its is upto the entire human being to keep the mind under a very spirit of natural feelings spreading the love under the sound of happiness.This is what i understand a based of universal Grammar. .