Introduction: goals of linguistic theory

Universality

The central goal of linguistic theory is to shed light on the core of grammatical principles that is common to all languages. Evidence for the assumption that there should be such a core of principles comes from two domains: language typology and language acquisition. Over the past decades our knowledge of linguistic typology has become more and more detailed, due to extensive fieldwork and fine-grained analysis of data from languages of different families. From this large body of research a broad picture emerges of ‘unity in variety’: core properties of grammars (with respect to the subsystems of sounds, words, phrases, and meaning) instantiate a set of universal properties. Grammars of individual languages draw their basic options from this limited set, which many researchers identify as Universal Grammar (UG). Each language thus reflects, in a specific way, the structure of ‘language’. A second source of evidence for universal grammatical principles comes from the universally recurring patterns of first language acquisition. It is well known that children acquiring their first language proceed in remarkably similar ways, going through developmental stages that are (to a large extent) independent of the language being learnt. By hypothesis, the innateness of UG is what makes grammars so much alike in their basic designs, and what causes the observed developmental similarities.

The approach to universality sketched above implies that linguistic theory should narrow down the class of universally possible grammars by imposing restrictions on the notions of ‘possible grammatical process’ and ‘possible interaction of processes’.