\documentstyle[12pt]{article}
\hyphenation{English grammar}
\newcommand{\sspace}{\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1}\small\normalsize}
\newcommand{\dspace}{\renewcommand{\baselinestretch}{1.78}\small\normalsize}
\begin{document}

\begin{titlepage}
\vspace*{1in}
\begin{center}
{\LARGE Hardwired for Language:
\medskip\medskip \\ 
Finding the Universal Grammar}
\bigskip\bigskip \\
{\large 24.900 Paper 1 
\medskip\medskip \\
Juliet C. Bourne 
\medskip\medskip \\
October 15, 1990}
\end{center}
\end{titlepage}

\newpage
{\narrower\sspace\noindent\it ``One of the important goals of modern
linguistic theory is to explain how it is that children can acquire
their first language. On many accounts the `evidence' that children
receive to learn language is quite impoverished and reinforcement by
adults is haphazard. Yet the process of first language acquisition
seems relatively easy and strikingly uniform.'' (Berwick~2) \par}
\vspace*{.15in}

\dspace
How do we learn our language? When we are very young no one ever tells
us the different parts of speech or the structures of sentences, and
yet we are able to form sentences before we are formally taught
`grammar'.  Do we learn the fundamentals of our language by imitation?
If that is so, how can children ever come up with the very original
sentences that they utter? Do we learn by positive or negative
reinforcement? This is a behaviorist theory of language. Some
linguists say that we already have some predisposition for language
when we are born.  So are certain fundamental parts of language
hardwired into our brains?  

Evidence to support such a theory that we are hardwired for language
is varied and plenty. Studying how children's language capabilities
develop provides a major body of evidence showing that there are at
least some aspects of language that are hardwired. However, studying
the final result of language acquisition, a mature adult's grammar,
also provides evidence supporting the theory that language is innate.
A mature adult's grammar contains a vast amount of linguistic
knowledge that was never {\em explicitly} taught.

All of the parts of language that can be shown to be in some way
hardwired or innate must form some Universal Grammar, a grammar that
speakers of all human languages share and which is responsible for the
development of language in humans. The search for such a Universal
Grammar involves trying to determine exactly which parts of language
are the most fundamental or hardwired. Studying the evidence which
supports the innateness theory of language is a step in the right
direction.

The first body of evidence involves how children learn language with
such apparent ease. Despite the lack of instruction or even reliable
data from which to build the language, children master their native
language at a very rapid rate. How they do this is the main area of
study for researchers trying to discover the Universal Grammar.
Indeed, Noam Chomsky, the originator of the Universal Grammar theory, 

\vspace*{.15in}
{\noindent\narrower\sspace Chomsky argues that the innateness
hypothesis also explains the fact of language acquisition,
specifically the remarkable rapidity with which children of all
cultures learn language, despite (it is argued) insufficient data as
input on the basis of which to learn the highly complex adult grammar.
(Hawkins~6)\par}
\dspace\noindent
This innateness hypothesis gave rise to the `little linguist' theory
of language acquisition. Several linguists have suggested the metaphor
of ``the child as a little linguist who tests hypotheses to discover
the syntactic rules of his language.'' (Valian~188) There are four
parts to this `hypothesis-testing' theory of how children acquire
language. First, the child learns phrase-structure rules and
transformational rules. Second, there is ``an innate portion of the
language-acquisition device [which] contains principles expressing the
linguistic universals.'' (Valian~189) Third, the device tests
hypotheses that are expressed as candidate rules. Finally, the
analyzed utterances serve as evidence against which hypotheses are
tested. (Valian~189) Thus, the acquisition of language is modeled as
hypothesizing a possible grammar, predicting the structure of
utterances, and then testing the hypothesis against the input. The
hypothesizing of the possible grammar is in turn derived from the
principles laid down by the innate Universal Grammar.

Seemingly, we are going in circles saying that the way children
acquire their language will show the basic principles of the Universal
Grammar we are looking for and then hypothesizing that children use
this Universal Grammar to acquire language. This is a recursive
argument, defining something in terms of itself. In order to break out
of this loop, we need to look at what adults know subconsciously about
the linguistic rules that govern their language. Presumedly, they were
never taught explicitly about the subtle phonologic, morphologic,
syntactic, or semantic rules of their language. Why then do they know
them? A plausible answer to this is that these rules are innate
somehow and thus form the beginnings of the Universal Grammar we are
seeking. 

First there are phonological principles which in detail vary from
language to language, but which in general are (theoretically) the
same for all languages. For example, consider the formation of plurals
in English. Upon close examination, it has been hypothesized that
speakers in some way have internalized properties of sounds and have
internally generalized the rule for forming plurals based on the
properties of sounds. This same hypothesis most likely holds true in
other languages also; in some way plurals are formed based on the
phonological properties of the word being pluralized. If this
hypothesis can be shown to be valid for a wide variety of languages,
then we can add a general pluralization principle to the sought-after
Universal Grammar.

There also seems to be morphological principles which are never
explicitly taught and therefore must be innate in some way. An example
of such a principle is blocking in English, in which some adjectives
such as curious can form a noun with the suffix -ity while others like
furious cannot. This is a phenomenon that is never explicitly taught.
Somehow, though, adults {\em know} that *furiosity is wrong. How do
they know this? Apparently there is some morphological rule which
blocks the formation of such a word. Another morphological example is
the existence of active and inactive affixes. English speakers are not
taught that -al is an active suffix and -ism is an inactive suffix.
Yet competent speakers of English {\em know} that ``sentimentalism''
is right and ``sentimentismal'' is wrong. Somehow they have knowledge
about the placement of active and inactive affixes. Both of these
examples show that these are morphological principles which speakers
of a language {\em know} without ever having been taught them. By
studying the similarities of these innate morphological rules among
different languages, generalized morphological principles,
non-specific to a particular language, can be hypothesized as parts of
the Universal Grammar.

Even higher levels of complexity of linguistic understanding such as
syntactic and semantic rules seem to be in some way innate. Competent
speakers of English can readily tell the semantic difference between
these two syntacticly similar sentences: ``Who does Oliver expect to
pay?'' and ``Who does Oliver expect to pay him?'' The addition of a
single word to the first sentence completely changes the meaning of
the sentence. In the first sentence, a tracer, or a place-holder for
the anonymous entity represented by ``who'', can be said to be in one
of two positions: before ``to pay'' or after ``to pay''. Both of these
possible positions indicate different interpretations of the first
sentence. However, when the word ``him'' is placed after ``to pay'' in
the second sentence, one of this possible interpretations no longer
applies, the ``payee'' is defined, and thus conveys a very different
meaning than the first sentence. The concept of tracers and how they
affect sentence meaning is not something that native speakers of
English have to learn; they use it subconsciously when trying to
determine the meaning of a sentence. Thus, it would seem that this is
a part of the hardwired language. If it could be determined if this
phenomenon, or one similar, occurs in other languages, a generalized
rule for using tracers to determine the meaning of a sentence could be
entered into our hypothesis for the Universal Grammar.

However, all of language cannot be preprogrammed into our heads.
Rather, the universal structure that {\it all} languages share must be
hardwired in some way. The theory of Universal Grammar involves formal
and substative universals, a set of parameters allowing variation
(which accounts for different languages), and the innateness
hypothesis.  Briefly, formal universals are ``those that determine the
form and the shape of the grammar.'' (Hawkins~6) Substative universals
are the contents of the formal universals. These principles are
claimed ``to be innately represented in the human species and to be a
part of our genetic endowment.'' (Hawkins~6) What this Universal
Grammar includes is yet to be discovered. Through studying how
children ``acquire'' language and what linguistic knowledge adults
know without ever being explicitly taught we should be able at least
hypothesize the Universal Grammar for all human languages, much like
the ``little linguist'' hypothesizes a grammar to fit a language.

\newpage
\begin{center}
{\bf Bibliography}
\end{center}

\sspace
Berwick, Robert C. {\it The Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge}.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.

\vspace*{.20in}
Hawkins, John A. ``Explaining Language Universals''. {\it Explaining
Language Universals}. John Hawkins, Ed. New York: Basil Blackwell,
Ltd, 1988. pp 3-28

\vspace*{.20in}
Valian, Virginia, Judith Winzemer, Anne Erreich. ``A `Little Linguist'
Model of Syntax Learning''. {\it Language Acquisition and Linguistic
Theory}. Susan Tavakolian, Ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981.
pp 188-209 

\end{document}
