Universal grammar and syntax/phonology parallelisms

Abstract

I consider a set of putative parallels, often said to be given by UG, between phonology and (what is typically taken to constitute) syntax. These include the claim that syllable structure and sentence structure exhibit serious linguistic parallels [Pierrehumbert, J., 1990. Phonological and phonetic representation. Journal of Phonetics 19, 375–394; Durand, J., 1995. Universalism in phonology: atoms, structures and derivation. In: Durand, J., Katamba, F. (Eds.), Frontiers of Phonology. Longman, London, pp. 267–288; Carstairs-McCarthy, A., 1999. The Origins of Complex Language: an Inquiry into the Evolutionary Beginnings of Sentences, Syllables and Truth. Oxford University Press, Oxford]; the claim that featural composition of phonological and syntactic objects is a specifically linguistic phenomenon, constituting a significant, specifically linguistic, parallelism between such objects; the claim that phonological constituents, like syntactic constituents, may be recursive; the claim that phonological heads are genuinely parallel to syntactic heads (and, relatedly, that phonological objects also contain specifiers, modifiers and complements: [Anderson, 2006; van der Hulst, H., 2000. Modularity and modality in phonology. In: Burton-Roberts, N., Carr, P., Docherty, G.J. (Eds.), Phonological Knowledge: Conceptual and Empirical Issues. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 207–243]); and the claim [Charette, M., 1991. Conditions on Phonological Government. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge] that the notion c-command plays a role in both syntax and phonology. We counter all of these claims. We also argue that the notion ‘movement’ as appealed to in syntactic analysis has no analogue in phonology. We then set these arguments in the context of a more general discussion of the nature of universality and the relationship between phonological knowledge and (allegedly) innate linguistic knowledge.