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The reality of a universal language faculty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Steven Pinker  and
Ray Jackendoff
Steven Pinker
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; pinker@wjh.harvard.eduhttp://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu
Ray Jackendoff
Affiliation:
Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155. Ray.jackendoff@tufts.eduhttp://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/RayJackendoff/index.htm Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM 87501
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Abstract

While endorsing Evans & Levinson's (E&L's) call for rigorous documentation of variation, we defend the idea of Universal Grammar as a toolkit of language acquisition mechanisms. The authors exaggerate diversity by ignoring the space of conceivable but nonexistent languages, trivializing major design universals, conflating quantitative with qualitative variation, and assuming that the utility of a linguistic feature suffices to explain how children acquire it.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 32 , Issue 5 , October 2009 , pp. 465 - 466
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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