Abstract
Abstract In the past 40 years there has been a fundamental change in our understanding of the nature of human language. The view of language as an arbitrary, socially learned animal communication system has been superseded by a view that regards language as a formally constrained, biologically determined, species-specific recursive system. Contemporary linguists, foremost among them Chomsky, hypothesize that all human languages are constructed from a small set of specific principles (the universal grammar) that limit the kinds of grammars that can occur. Evidence for this claim comes from two sources: the linguistic properties of the languages of the world and the way children acquire the language of their environment, whether spoken or signed (see Petitto, this volume). Research into the properties of currently extant languages has appropriately led to some revisions of the particular properties originally proposed for the universal grammar, but the notion that languages do share some fundamental properties has largely been confirmed.
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