The Place of Universal Grammar in the Study of Language and Mind: A Response to Dabrowska (2015)

• Authors: Oliver Boxell
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Generative Linguistics proposes that the human ability to produce and comprehend language is fundamentally underwritten by a uniquely linguistic innate system called Universal Grammar (UG). In her recent paper What is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it? Ewa Dabrowska reviews a range of evidence and argues against the idea of UG from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective. In the current paper, I take each of Dabrowska’s arguments in turn and attempt to show why they are not well founded, either because of flaws in her argumentation or because of a careful consideration of the available empirical evidence. I also attempt to demonstrate how evidence from the fields Dabrowska reviews actually supports the notion of UG. However, arguments are additionally presented in favor of integrating an understanding of domain-specific UG with an understanding of domain-general cognitive capacities in order to understand the language faculty completely.

Keywords

EN

Universal Grammar; I-language; psycholinguistics; neurolinguistics; evolutionary linguistics; language acquisition

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Open Linguistics
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 2
• Issue: 1

Dates

received

2015-09-27

accepted

2016-08-02

online

2016-09-30

Contributors

author

Oliver Boxell

• The Cognitive Science Institute, Unit 6, 611 Old Meridian Street, Greenwood, IN, 46143, United States of America

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/opli-2016-0017