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This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the general perspective in the linguistic community on language universals. It then presents an overview of the subsequent chapters in this book. This is followed by a discussion of the importance of interdisciplinary research and a multidisciplinary approach towards understanding language universals.

This introductory chapter exemplifies different approaches to the problem of understanding the relationship between language universals and language change, using the heuristic categories structural, historical, and external. The chapter is organized as follows: Section 1.2 comments in the term universal; Section 1.3 comments on the term explanation; Section 1.4 summarizes structural approaches; Section 1.5 summarizes historical approaches; and Section 1.6 summarizes external approaches.

This chapter takes the goal of linguistics to be an explanation of how whole languages get to be the way they are. It shows that some insight can be gained into the forces shaping languages by considering them as products of a historical spiral involving both acquisition and production, learning and speaking, and occasionally innovating, over many generations.

This chapter focuses on linguistic universals embodied in Universal Grammar (UG), a characterization of the innate properties of the language faculty. Approaching language universals from a minimalist perspective, it begins by contrasting I-universals (innate properties of UG) with E-universals (universals in the Greenbergian tradition). It argues that even if every language displayed some property P, it would not imply that P is an I-universal, whereas P would be considered an E-universal. The chapter considers the relative importance of the following three factors in accounting for I-universals: (a) genetic endowment, (b) experience, and (c) language-independent principles. It concludes that the minimalist perspective suggests that I-universals—the key properties of UG—may not be genetically encoded but instead may derive from language-independent principles of good design.

Using the preceding chapter as a point of departure, this chapter offers a critical perspective on the notion of innate universals. It presents a “minimal nativism” view, according to which a brain area should be seen as embodying a kind of language universal if it is genetically predisposed toward fulfilling a certain sufficiently general linguistic function, for example by virtue of its strategic connectivity. On this view, Broca's area could still count as the brain locus of a linguistic universal, even if it supports other functions beside language.

Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (HCF) proposed that recursion is the only thing that distinguishes language (a) from other human capacities, and (b) from the capacities of animals. These factors are independent. The narrow faculty of language might include more than recursion, falsifying (a). Or it might consist only of recursion, although parts of the broad faculty might be uniquely human as well, falsifying (b). This chapter presents a view that is contrasted with HCF's above. It shows that there is considerably more of language that is special, though still a plausible product of the processes of evolution. It assesses the key bodies of evidence, coming to a different reading from HCF's. The chapter organizes the discussion by distinguishing the conceptual, sensorimotor, and specifically linguistic aspects of the broad language faculty in turn.

This chapter argues that the existence of universals in language would only be surprising if the rest of cognition, as well as the world at large, were unstructured. Given that the world is in some sense and to some extent predictable, universals should be sought in the structure of information it presents to the language system. A productive approach to the study of language universals could follow the lead of biology, where looking at the interplay of evolution and development is proving particularly effective.

This chapter argues that theology needs a new language. It adduces quotes from various recent publications that show that after two millennia the meaning of Jesus’ words has become for many people in the West increasingly difficult to grasp, and it concurs with Raymond Brown's (1975) words referring not only to the Scriptures but also to the dogmas of the Church that since “God's revelation has been phrased by men” it requires constant rethinking. This rethinking must take into account the historical situation, the culture, the language, and the theological and philosophical limitations of those who wrote and those who interpreted the Bible. The chapter discusses the cultural underpinnings of the Nicene Creed, and offers an attempt at rethinking this Creed and restating it in a narrative form, in simple words available in all languages of the world. It argues that Christian faith must be expressible in all languages, including those that do not have the traditional Christian vocabulary and it formulates “Christian faith in a nutshell” in a radically new form, on the basis of empirical universals of language.

Until the Revolution, the 18th century in France produced just one aprioristic universal language scheme, which is Faiguet's in his article ‘Langue nouvelle’ for the Encyclopédie. In the decade after the Revolution, at least seven were generated, of which three are considered in this chapter. The divorce of literary and so-called ‘scientific’ language, is most vividly expressed by Lancelin. No one before the Revolution distinguished so clearly and confidently between scientific and poetic language. This chapter is essentially an interpretation of what Lancelin and his contemporaries understood to be the difference between ‘l'analyste’, and ‘un poëte’, between ‘exposer froidemen’ and ‘émouvoir’.

This chapter argues that the evolution of more complex sequential learning and processing abilities forms part of the foundation for the origin of language. It relates general properties of sequential learning to the structure of language and suggests that many language universals — that is, invariant subpatterns of language — may derive from underlying constraints on the way sequential structure is learned and processed, rather than from an innate biological adaptation for grammar. Evidence from computational simulations and psychological experiments involving the learning of simple artificial languages indicates that specific language universals can be explained by sequential learning constraints. This perspective further implies that languages themselves can be viewed as evolving systems, adapting to the innate constraints of the human learning and processing mechanisms. The chapter also argues that language evolution must be understood through processes that work on three different, but partially overlapping timescales: the individual timescale (through learning in development), the cultural timescale (through iterated learning across generations), and the biological timescale (through natural selection of the species).

This chapter places the human ability for complex symbolic communication at the centre of language evolution. It rejects the notion that the many subpatterns of language structure that can be found across all the languages of the worlds — the so-called language universals — are products of cultural processes, or that they reflect a set of evolved innate constraints (a language-specific ‘Universal Grammar’). Instead, evidence from philosophy and semiotics suggests that they derive from a third kind of constraint originating from within the linguistic symbol system itself. Because of the complex relationships between words and what they refer to (as symbols), semiotic constraints arise from within the symbol system when putting words together to form phrases and sentences. During the evolution of language, humans probably discovered the set of universal semiotic constraints. These constraints govern not only human language but also, by their very nature, any system of symbolic communication, terrestrial or otherwise.

Chapter 3 describes colonial efforts to purify Indian languages by substituting for their diversity of scripts and modes of spelling a single, uniform system of transliteration based on the Roman alphabet. Often understood as a first step toward the creation of a universal language, or toward the elevation of English to this role, proposals for Roman transliteration were deeply influenced by seventeenth-century projects for a universal language or manner of writing. Like these earlier projects, Roman transliteration in the Indian context was seen by some as a means of reversing the curse of Babel that resulted in the diversity of languages, and of reprising the miracle of Pentecost, at which the Apostles were able to communicate the Gospel in all tongues. The idea of a universal language often expressed the desire for a universal religion based on Christian monotheism, and for the defeat of polytheism that colonialists explained as a result of linguistic diversity and ambiguity.

After a preliminary defence of the term linguistic relativism, as distinct from Whorfianism, it is observed that the principles of science demand that the linguist seeks to establish maximal generalizations over the languages of the world—language universals. An a priori rejection of universals, common in anthropological linguistics, is thus methodologically unscientific. Relativism accepts only those universals that follow from the necessities imposed by the ecology of language. Universalists maintain that there are universals beyond ecological necessity, mostly found in the ‘abstract’ grammatical machinery of each language, the search for which has just begun. They take the grammar of a language to be a standard module, support coming from cases where speakers have definite judgements of ungrammaticality or impossible semantic readings despite not possibly having encountered the corresponding ‘negative evidence’ nor any underlying rules. Examples are adduced related to internal anaphora resolution, internal versus external datives, and zero-causatives in English. A few tentative ‘abstract’ language universals are proposed. Special attention is paid to constituent structure as a universal for the analysis of linguistic structures.

This chapter presents Minae Mizumura's arguments regarding external language—that people, since discovering language, did not read and write the language they spoke, and that they communicated through the language of a neighboring civilization that exerted influence. These languages are referred to by Mizumura as universal languages. Mizumura develops her argument around three main concepts: universal language, local language, and national language. In explaining her notion, Mizumura draws from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) as a foundation. She focuses on Anderson's understanding of the formation of national languages through nationalism. The chapter examines how, during the Enlightenment period, Europeans began to ignore Greek and Latin in their pursuit of knowledge, and thus read and write in their own languages. It concludes how this “golden age” of national languages ended as a result of the rise of the novel as a literary genre.

By situating James Joyce within a larger discourse about the problem of Babel, this chapter show how hieroglyphs were used to make arguments for the origin of linguistic differences. The journal transition—in which Joyce’s work was serialized—served as a clearinghouse for ideas about how a new linguistic unity might be forged: either through Joyce’s Wake-ese or through the philosopher C. K. Ogden’s universal language of Basic English. Fascinated by these theories of universal language and drawn to the anti-imperialist politics underlying them, Joyce in Ulysses andFinnegans Wake turns to visual and gestural languages—film, hieroglyphs, advertisements, and illuminated manuscripts—in an effort to subvert theories of ‘Aryan’ language and imagine a more inclusive origin for the world’s cultures. The commonality of writing and new media become in Joyce a political gesture: a way of insisting on the unity of all races and languages in a mythic past against Nazi claims for racial purity.

The third chapter explores the implications of the cultural evolution of language for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new and much more tractable form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the natural world (N-induction). It is argued that of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier and that, more broadly, understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, linguistic or otherwise, during development requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the so-called “logical” problem of language acquisition—i.e., how children correctly generalize from limited input to the whole language—because the language itself has been shaped by previous generations of learners to fit the domain-general biases that children bring to bear on acquisition. The approach also provides insight into the nature of language universals, and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology.

This chapter discusses the history of crosslinguistic research on language acquisition as well as the limitations of the traditional concept of crosslinguistic research. It examines three phases of crosslinguistic research on language acquisition: the period of single language studies, the search for language universals, and the emergence of the parameter theory. The first phase began with researchers focusing on children acquiring single languages in order to identify a genetic basis for human language acquisition. The second phase started with the notion that children begin with a universal language acquisition device. The third phase began with the realization that children might begin acquiring language with different parameter settings and thus display early differences between languages. The chapter also considers crosslinguistic surveys as an important component of crosslinguistic research, how children acquire polysynthesis, and how the results of crosslinguistic studies can be used to build a comprehensive description of language acquisition.

Discusses possible reasons for Descartes's move to the Netherlands, and his avoidance of patronage there. Considers his work on optics (including the sine law of refraction and the grinding of hyperbolic lenses), music, and metaphysics (arguments for the existence of God, his transcendence, and the immortality of the soul). Also deals with Descartes's construction of an artificial, universal language, changes in his thinking about the doctrine of clarity and distinctness, his solution to the Pappus problem, his classification of curves, and his work on meteorology that he expanded into a project to explain the whole of physics. This work was considerably slowed down by his dispute with Beeckman over the authorship of ideas.

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. This chapter examines these arguments and shows that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets this criterion: grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. In conclusion, there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.