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Children learn language through exposure to the environment. However, Chomsky's most famous and controversial hypothesis is that the child brings resources to language learning beyond those used for other sorts of learning: he claims that the ability to learn language is in part a cognitive specialization of our species, a ‘Universal Grammar’ that is ‘wired into’ children's brains. This chapter is devoted to a fairly careful exegesis of the Universal Grammar hypothesis, the evidence for it, the arguments against it, and the tensions and challenges it presents to linguistic theory and the other disciplines on which it impinges. It is argued that a suitably nuanced version of the Universal Grammar hypothesis is supportable, and that it should continue to play the central role in linguistic investigation that it has enjoyed since Aspects.

Traditional generative grammar assumes without argument that only syntax is ‘generative’, that is, that the combinatorial complexity of language arises entirely by virtue of its syntactic organization. This chapter presents a framework in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are equally generative. Syntax is thus only one of several parallel sources of grammatical organization. The generative components communicate with each other through ‘interface’ components; it is shown that these interfaces are of nontrivial complexity. It is also shown that many of the alternative frameworks for generative grammar share this sort of parallel organization.

This study proposed a substantial revision of the basic organization of language laid out by mainstream generative grammar. Many aspects of the revision have been in currency in one or another of the alternative frameworks such as LFG, HPSG, Cognitive Grammar, Construction Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar, and Autolexical Syntax. There is a sense of an implicit consensus among the alternative frameworks — not a monolithic consensus by any means, but one with more of a family resemblance character. This chapter presents a summary of conclusions, highlighting the important elements of this consensus.

This chapter describes various issues suggested by the analogy between morality and linguistics. The first part discusses what might be involved in a generative “moral grammar”. The second part discusses what might be involved in a universal moral grammar that parallels universal linguistic grammar.

The third chapter describes generativist semantics. From 1960 onwards, aspects of structuralist semantics (componential analysis in particular) were incorporated into generative grammar. Within the history of lexical semantics, this period occupies a pivotal position. It introduces an attempt to formalize semantics as part of a formal grammar. At the same time, the mentalist orientation of generative grammar creates an interest in psychological adequacy. This double extension of componential analysis raises questions about formal and psychological adequacy that motivate the strands of research that emerged after the generativist period. Cognitive semantics focuses on the psychological side. It embodies a maximalist approach that intends to study linguistic meaning as part and parcel of cognition at large. By contrast, a number of other approaches stay closer to the structuralist inspiration, exploring forms of meaning description that are in various ways more restricted (and possibly more formalisable) than what is pursued in cognitive semantics.

One of the most striking features of language is the fact that speakers can understand and construct an indefinitely large number of sentences that they have never experienced before. This leads to the conclusion that a speaker's knowledge is instantiated as a set of generative principles (or rules) for constructing and recognizing sentences; these principles constitute the speaker's mental grammar. After enumerating some of the general types of rules proposed in various frameworks of generative grammar, the chapter discusses some problems that combinatoriality poses for popular theories of semantic memory and neural nets.

This chapter begins by couching the questions of semantic theory in mentalistic terms, so that semantics can be compatible with generative grammar. It contrasts this position with a number of other views of what semantics is about. The chapter also addresses the putative distinction between linguistic meaning and ‘world knowledge’, arguing that various ways of making this distinction do not serve the intended purpose. Rather, if there is a special ‘linguistic semantics’, it is the theory of the interface components between meaning and linguistic expression.

This chapter focuses on the historical and conceptual development of mainstream generative grammar. The principles of argumentation in mainstream syntax are discussed. The history of modern mainstream syntactic theory is reviewed, showing that most of the machinery of mainstream generative grammar — classical transformational grammar, GB Theory, Principles and Parameters Theory, and the Minimalist Program — is a consequence of four fundamental axioms.

This chapter reviews the linguistic literature concerning syntactic atoms in two different types of linguistic theories: mainstream generative grammar and Construction Grammars. In the first approach, grammatical relations are defined as subtypes of the universal Merge operation of Chomsky's Minimalist Program or, alternately, of the Head-Dependent relation developed in Dependency Grammars (which is shown to be identical with the Merger operation). The grammatical relations subject-verb, verb-object, and verb-indirect objects constitute the clausal core. The motivation for positing such formal syntactic relations in linguistics derives from the fact that they are defined solely by their coding properties and grammatical behaviour but dissociated from particular semantic roles. This defines core grammatical relations as purely formal components of the structure of clause, whose semantics is a lexical property of individual verbs. Alternative conceptions of syntactic units under Construction Grammars are then discussed, in particular the claim that grammatical relations are in fact meaningful linguistic signs, constituting abstract ‘argument structure constructions’ that possess uniform or at the least prototypical meaning.

The investigation of the future‐referring constructions follows the functional–typological framework of grammaticalization. This first chapter discusses some basic principles of the framework, and highlights the reasons why it is chosen over the generative grammar paradigm. It also introduces the notion of Auxiliary Verb Construction (AVC), which will be employed in the analysis of the future‐referring constructions (FCs), instead of the misty notion of “periphrasis”. Finally, it illustrates the reason why such a study was clearly missing from the literature on the history of the Greek language.

This chapter presents a framework for understanding the structure, function, and acquisition of causal theories from a rational computational perspective. Using a “reverse engineering” approach, it considers the computational problems that intuitive theories help to solve, focusing on their role in learning and reasoning about causal systems, and then using Bayesian statistics to describe the ideal solutions to these problems. The resulting framework highlights an analogy between causal theories and linguistic grammars: just as grammars generate sentences and guide inferences about their interpretation, causal theories specify a generative process for events, and guide causal inference.

This chapter begins by exploring the consequences of a particular instantiation of Uniformity called UTAH (Uniform Theta-role Assignment Hypothesis). Repeated application of UTAH drives the development of MGG from Government/Binding Theory to later Principles and Parameters Theory. The Minimalist Program is considered in light of this development, and aspects of MP shared with earlier theories are highlighted. It is shown how the application of Uniformity in the development of mainstream generative grammar (MGG) has made the Minimalist Program indistinguishable in its essential architecture from Generative Semantics, long discredited. Finally, the chapter outlines the architectures of a theory that are motivated principally by Uniformity rather than empirical considerations, and which moreover introduce an arguably unacceptable cost in terms of theoretical complexity elsewhere in the grammar.

A causal theory can be thought of as a grammar that generates events, and that can be used to parse events to identify underlying causal structure. This chapter considers what the components of such a grammar might be — the analogues of syntactic categories and the rules that relate them in a linguistic grammar. It presents two proposals for causal grammars. The first asserts that the variables which describe events can be organized into causal categories, and allows relationships between those categories to be expressed. The second uses a probabilistic variant of first-order logic in order to describe the ontology and causal laws expressed in an intuitive theory. This chapter illustrates how both kinds of grammar can guide causal learning.

The contemporary world presents us with the reality of globalization and multiplicity, yet we still face powerful appeals to singularity. Beyond vague notions such as hybridity and multiculturalism, can we fashion alternative versions of location and identity? In this context the Introduction considers transnational fiction as a question of form, outlining the idea of a ‘grammar of identity’, and exploring its key terms: the metonymic, the generative, the transitive, the navigational, the nature of the boundary. In doing so, it draws on figures such as Chomsky, Jakobson, Freud, and Levinas. The implications for such a theory are set out in areas ranging from migration, to myth, to psychology, to ethics, to fiction itself. The discussion sets out the case for seeing transnational fiction as intrinsically navigational, a form of great significance for our times.

This introductory chapter starts with a brief discussion of the challenges connected with describing and analyzing an extinct language, as well as problems having to do with the relationship between written sources and theories of internalized grammar. It then goes on to situate the language geographically and historically. The sources used are presented, and their philological quality is discussed. The basic features of the descriptive framework, generative grammar, are presented with a focus on those elements that are relevant for the present description.

This chapter is an enquiry into the goals and methods of linguistics, with the aim of understanding both the specifics of the discipline and the relationships between linguists’ take on the methodology of their field and general principles of philosophy of science. The first part highlights linguistics as an inquiry into language, as opposed to languages. The second part describes the shift from structural linguistics to generative grammar as a paradigm shift, involving major changes in both what is studied and how it is studied. The next section focuses on the empirical import of contemporary linguistics, discussing standards of explanation and prediction, as well as confirmation and refutation of linguistic hypotheses. The last part introduces linguistic universals, what they are and how they may be identified and explained, thus making explicit the connection with the goal of understanding not only the variety of languages but the faculty of language.

Presents and critically examines the view that knowledge of a language can partitioned into a mental lexicon (which lists the words) and a syntax (which lists the rules for combining the words). Contrary to the entailments of the model, rules may have only limited applicability, and full compositionality is rare.