Criticism of Universal Grammar

Abstract

We make a rigorous assessment of the critical approaches against Universal Grammar that have exerted some influence in academic circles. We start from the hypothesis that all human languages develop from a fundamental set of innate constraints and mechanisms essential for any possible human language, defined in terms of a computational, recursive system. Universal Grammar (UG) is reduced to Merge, an operation that takes any two syntactic elements and combines them recursively into a new, hierarchically structured expression, so it has to be deemed a formal mechanism that defines the biologically determined initial state of the language faculty. Thus, according to the strong minimalist thesis, the computational system has been optimally designed to interact essentially with the language of thought. The arguments in favour of the hypothesis of Universal Grammar have to do with the nature of the poverty of stimuli and the hypothesis of the critical period in linguistic ontogeny. Regarding criticism of the Universal Grammar construct, we believe that they originate from paralogisms or conceptual confusions, so they do not constitute, strictly speaking, any rebuttal to said construct