User:RemoLing/sandbox

Universal Grammar

RESTRUCTURING THE ARGUMENT SECTION HERE

This really needs some citations from Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, also Huybregts 2017 for other UG formulations.

Perhaps some Tattersall stuff.

citations need to be updated, there are a few Chomsky quotes that have no citation the whole paragraph on UG vs UG* is very opaque

As Chomsky puts it, "Evidently, development of language in the individual must involve three factors: genetic endowment, which sets limits on the attainable languages, thereby making language acquisition possible; external data, converted to the experience that selects one or another language within a narrow range; principles not specific to the Faculty of Language."

"The conclusion that merge falls within UG holds whether such recursive generation is unique to FL (faculty of language) or is appropriated from other systems."

Test cites

Will primarily work on getting the argument section in order. I dont think the argument is presented well, the citations are all over the place. Some evidence from child acquisition would be well suited here. The Poverty of the Stimulus argument is linked, but it could use a short expose.

Roadmap:

• update some citations, especially old Chomsky vs new Chomsky and other ideas about UG
• work on the argument section, try and make the argument more clear and differentiate between historic ideas about UG and present ideas about UG
• What are some good references from the course materials? Thinking in terms of things that show us that children are likely to have innate linguistic knowledge.

Comments are indented

Consider Valian and Gordon (5-Sep), Lidz (21-Nov), Yang (26-Nov) as possibilities. Cecilemckee (talk) 16:45, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

Valian looks pretty good, but something more recent might be better, going to look at Yang as soon as I can get to it RemoLing (talk) 06:00, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Work in progress:

Comments are indented

Hey Remo! I know that a lot of your article needs work, and I have read through your own comments on specific parts. One thing that I feel should really be focused on is the fact that the lead section is very academic and full of sentences that could be confusing to readers with no linguistic experience. This is present throughout and you acknowledge in the Argument section in the 5 paragraph. 

Another issue I think that you are still working toward is that there are not many sections present that reference any articles from 533, yet. My question is where would you put these citations in when re-working the article. Do you think that if you reference language development in the lead it will improve your article? Maybe you can reference it when defining 'innateness'? Maybe when editing the lead to can allude to the different theories of development and where UG fits within these theories? I know that this will be a big challenge as there are so many things that need to be looked at but I think keeping some of these questions in mind would help you when editing.

Good Luck! JoeNavek (talk) 01:26, 27 September 2019 (UTC)JoeNavek

Yes, the lead needs some simplification for sure. I think in terms of where to put literature from 533, I'm not sure. Maybe I could create a "evidence in favor" subsection in the argument section.RemoLing (talk) 07:19, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Review Considerations:

Needs some recent literature and studies, thinking Moro, Yang.

I think UG needs to be seperated into a language faculty UG and a cognitive UG.

Chomsky Quotes

The theory of the genetically based language faculty is called Universal Grammar (the galilean challenge)

Lead

Universal grammar (UG) in linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that a certain set of structural rules are innate to humans, independent of sensory experience. With more linguistic stimuli received in the course of psychological development, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG.[1] It is sometimes known as "mental grammar", and stands contrasted with other "grammars", e.g. prescriptive, descriptive and pedagogical.[2][3] The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare.[4] It is a matter of empirical investigation to determine precisely what properties are universal and what linguistic capacities are innate.

The last sentence needs some work. The lead has the following problem: UG has been proposed by other people for Chomsky, so this article needs to decide whether it wants to be about UG AS PROPOSED BY CHOMSKY or UG IN ALL ITERATIONS. I think the latter makes more sense. Then the lead sentence should maybe be: "Universal grammar (UG) in linguistics, is the idea that there is a genetic component to the human language faculty. The most influential formulation of UG comes from Noam Chomsky". Also, not so sure if the term "language faculty" is good to use in the lead, as different people understand different things under this term.RemoLing (talk) 21:42, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Argument

The theory of universal grammar proposes that if human beings are brought up under normal conditions (not those of extreme sensory deprivation), then they will always develop language with certain properties (e.g., distinguishing nouns from verbs, or distinguishing function words from content words). The theory proposes that there is an innate, genetically determined language faculty that knows these rules, making it easier and faster for children to learn to speak than it otherwise would be. This faculty does not know the vocabulary of any particular language (so words and their meanings must be learned), and there remain several parameters which can vary freely among languages (such as whether adjectives come before or after nouns) which must also be learned.

This paragraph is essentially still stuck in a Principles and Parameters age. More recent formulations of UG propose UG could be as little as Merge. Generally the issue here seems to me that as far as I know, Chomsky never clearly defined UG, in the sense that he never said what definitely *is* UG. So, at most UG is the understanding that certain *unspecified* amounts of the human language facculty are innate. There is no citations for which properties exactly are supposed to be innate. Much of generative work is about teasing apart what could be innate and what's not. Not sure yet how to rewrite this paragraph to reflect thatRemoLing (talk) 01:37, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

As Chomsky puts it, "Evidently, development of language in the individual must involve three factors: genetic endowment, which sets limits on the attainable languages, thereby making language acquisition possible; external data, converted to the experience that selects one or another language within a narrow range; principles not specific to the Faculty of Language." EDIT: these are third-factor principles

Occasionally, aspects of universal grammar seem describable in terms of general details regarding cognition. For example, if a predisposition to categorize events and objects as different classes of things is part of human cognition, and directly results in nouns and verbs showing up in all languages, then it could be assumed that rather than this aspect of universal grammar being specific to language, it is more generally a part of human cognition.

EDIT: This whole following part is a mess, written in overly opaque language.RemoLing (talk) 01:37, 26 September 2019 (UTC) To distinguish properties of languages that can be traced to other facts regarding cognition from properties of languages that cannot, the abbreviation UG* can be used. UG is the term often used by Chomsky for those aspects of the human brain which cause language to be the way that it is (i.e. are universal grammar in the sense used here) but here for discussion, it is used for those aspects which are furthermore specific to language (thus UG, as Chomsky uses it, is just an abbreviation for universal grammar, but UG* as used here is a subset of universal grammar).

PROPOSED REWRITE:

UG* is a label that is used for aspects of the human language faculty that are not reducible to general facts of human cognition, while UG describes all innate capabilities for language, including those derived from general facts of human cognition. All of UG* is therefore part of UG, but not all of UG is subsumed in UG*. For Chomsky however, UG

More recently, Chomsky has proposed that language may simply be the basis for human cognition as we know it, rendering this distinction superfluous. (NEED A CITATION HERE, probably Chomsky & BErwick 2016, or the Galilean challenge).RemoLing (talk) 01:37, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

In the same article, Chomsky casts the theme of a larger research program in terms of the following question: "How little can be attributed to UG while still accounting for the variety of 'I-languages' attained, relying on third factor principles?" (I-languages meaning internal languages, the brain states that correspond to knowing how to speak and understand a particular language, and third factor principles meaning (3) in the previous quote).

WHICH ARTICLE?

Chomsky has speculated that UG might be extremely simple and abstract, for example only a mechanism for combining symbols in a particular way, which he calls "merge". The following quote shows that Chomsky does not use the term "UG" in the narrow sense UG* suggested above:

This needs to be rewritten: The following quote shows that Chomsky does not use the term "UG" in the narrow sense UG* suggested above -> Chomsky does not make a distinction between UG and UG*.

"The conclusion that merge falls within UG holds whether such recursive generation is unique to FL (faculty of language) or is appropriated from other systems."

I dont see how this quote equates to the below... RemoLing (talk)

In other words, merge is seen as part of UG because it causes language to be the way it is, universal, and is not part of the environment or general properties independent of genetics and environment. Merge is part of universal grammar whether it is specific to language, or whether, as Chomsky suggests, it is also used for an example in mathematical thinking.

The distinction is important because there is a long history of argument about UG*, whereas most people working on language agree that there is universal grammar. Many people assume that Chomsky means UG* when he writes UG (and in some cases he might actually mean UG* [though not in the passage quoted above]).

Some students of universal grammar study a variety of grammars to extract generalizations called linguistic universals, often in the form of "If X holds true, then Y occurs." These have been extended to a variety of traits, such as the phonemes found in languages, the word orders which languages choose, and the reasons why children exhibit certain linguistic behaviors.

Later linguists who have influenced this theory include Chomsky and Richard Montague, developing their version of this theory as they considered issues of the argument from poverty of the stimulus to arise from the constructivist approach to linguistic theory. The application of the idea of universal grammar to the study of second language acquisition (SLA) is represented mainly in the work of McGill linguist Lydia White.

Syntacticians generally hold that there are parametric points of variation between languages, although heated debate occurs over whether UG constraints are essentially universal due to being "hard-wired" (Chomsky's principles and parameters approach), a logical consequence of a specific syntactic architecture (the generalized phrase structure approach) or the result of functional constraints on communication (the functionalist approach).

References

• Chomsky, Noam (2017), "The Galilean Challenge: Architecture and Evolution of Language", Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 880: 012015, doi:10.1088/1742-6596/880/1/012015, ISSN 1742-6588
• Chomsky, Noam (2007), "Approaching UG from Below", Interfaces + Recursion = Language?, DE GRUYTER, pp. 1–30, doi:10.1515/9783110207552-001, ISBN 9783110207552
• Ambridge, Ben; Lieven, Elena V. M. (2011). Child Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-76804-7.
• Baker, Mark C. The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar. Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-19-860632-X.
• Beattie, James. "Of Universal Grammar". Section II, The Theory of Language (1788). Rpt in Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783, 1986.)
• Blair, Hugh. Lecture 6, 7, and 8, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, (1783). Rpt New York: Garland, 1970.
• Burnett, James. Of the Origin and Progress of Language. Edinburgh, 1774–1792.
• Chomsky, N. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press, 1965. ISBN 0-262-53007-4.
• Elman, J., Bates, E. et al. Rethinking innateness. MIT Press, 1996.
• Harris, James. Hermes or A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar. (1751, 1771.)
• Kliesch, C. (2012). Making sense of syntax – Innate or acquired? Contrasting universal grammar with other approaches to language acquisition. Journal of European Psychology Students, 3, 88–94,
• "Of Universal Grammar". In "Grammar". Encyclopædia Britannica, (1771).
• Pesetsky, David. "Linguistic Universals and Universal Grammar". In The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Ed. Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1999.
• Sampson, G. The "Language Instinct" Debate. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005. ISBN 0-8264-7384-9.
• Smith, Adam. "Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages". In Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Ed. J. C. Bryce. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983, 203–226.
• Smith, Adam. "Of the Origin and Progress of Language". Lecture 3, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Ed. J. C. Bryce. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983, 9–13.
• Tomasello, M. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Harvard University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-674-01030-2.
• Window on Humanity. A Concise Introduction to Anthropology. Conrad Phillip Kottak. Ed. Kevin Witt, Jill Gordon. The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 2005.
• White, Lydia. "Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar". Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-521-79647-4
• Zuidema, Willem. How the poverty of stimulus solves the poverty of stimulus. "Evolution of Language: Fourth International Conference", Harvard University, March 2002.