Confusion Of Tongues Research Articles

Evaluating Attributions of Delay and Confusion in Young Bilinguals: Special Insights from Infants Acquiring a Signed and a Spoken Language

THE STRIKING image of Janus, the Roman god, seizes our imagination, as he is depicted with two faces, each gazing in opposite directions. With one set of eyes cast toward a rising sun and the other toward a setting sun, he was the god of beginnings but one who could also ensure good endings. For nearly a century, parents, educators, and scientists have, like Janus, been of two minds about the bilingual child, a phenomenon that is so pervasive that we have come to call it “the bilingual paradox” in our laboratory (Petitto et al. 2001). [End Page 4] As if with eyes cast toward the positive light of a rising sun, we freely marvel at the seemingly effortless ways that young children can acquire two or more languages simultaneously if exposed to them in early life. At the same time, with eyes cast toward the darker light of a setting sun, we view early simultaneous bilingual exposure suspiciously, fearing that exposing a young child to two languages too early may cause language delay and, worse, language confusion. Indeed, the general perspective that young children are somehow harmed by early bilingual exposure is reflected both in educational settings and in comments made by the many parents raising bilingual children who visit our laboratory. For example, the fear that exposing a child to another language too early may interrupt “normal” language development is reflected in contemporary educational practice, whereby children in many countries around the world receive their first formal schooling in the other majority language well after the developmentally crucial toddler years. As support for this practice, many have invoked the dreaded notion of “language contamination” that ostensibly results from early exposure to another language (e.g., Crawford 1999). Following this general spirit, parents visiting our laboratory often opt to “hold back” one of the family’s two languages in their child’s early life. They believe that it may be better to establish one language firmly before exposing their child to the family’s other language so as to avoid confusing the child. They also worry that very early bilingual language exposure may put their child in danger of never being as competent in either of the two languages as monolingual children are in one.

Misleading the Students: Conceptual Difficulties in Woolfolk’s Account of Motivation

INTRODUCTION It is difficult to help student teachers come to understand the concepts and issues basic to the social, psychological, and philosophical foundations of education in these times. Some on the right, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, regard the social context as having so far degenerated that all that is left is “emotivism” and a confusion of tongues. Some of the radical left, such as Herbert Marcuse, regard capitalism as so constricting that one needs to get beyond tolerance, yet one sees no hope in so doing. Some of the liberal left, such as Richard Rorty, believe that the system is now controlled by greedy and selfish people. And even those who wish to get beyond the labels “right” and “left,” such as Jeffrey Stout, fear that the language of the market is leaking into other practices and corrupting them.

Social Capital as Process: The Meanings and Problems of a Theoretical Metaphor

In this study, we suggest that the difficulty in defining, locating, and measuring social capital is at core a philosophical confusion of language, and not just a consequence of excessively wide application. The term “capital” refers to resources for investment. Financial capital consists of specific quantities of assets. Human capital, a metaphorical extension of financial capital, also consists of specific quantities of assets, in the form of skills or credentials. However, social capital, a third metaphorical construction, does not consist of resources that are held by individuals or by groups but of processes of social interaction leading to constructive outcomes. Therefore, we argue, social capital is not located at any one level of analysis: it emerges across levels of analysis. The confusion over the meaning of this term, then, is a consequence of a metaphorical confusion of a substantive quantity (capital) and a process that takes place through stages (embedded, goal‐directed social relations). Locating and defining social capital is further complicated by the variability, contextuality, and conditionality of the process. Stages of social relations that lead to constructive outcomes for one group of people or in one situation may not lead to constructive outcomes for another group or in another situation. To illustrate empirically how social capital may be thought of as a process consisting of stages and to demonstrate why the concept is inherently problematic, we employ data from the 1995 interviews of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). These data enable us to examine connections among the stages of the social capital process found in the literature and to look at predictors of academic achievement, a central topic in research on this topic.

Traversing the Boundaries of Language: Multilingualism and Linguistic Difference in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willehalm

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from then did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. Genesis 11.9 man mohte iewedernthalben sin, dar zuo vor im unde hinden, vil grozer storje vinden, mit der sprache ein ander gar unkunt. da vuor manec sunder munt, der niht wesse, waz der ander sprach, ob er erge oder guete jach. Willehalm, 399, 24-30(1) In Wolfram von Eschenbach's heroic epic Willehalm the narrator describes the final battle between Saracens and Christians on the field of Alischanz as a microcosm of the multilingual world created by God's destruction of the tower of Babel. In the passage from the epic cited above, the confusion of languages evokes the auditory chaos recounted in the story of Genesis: the sounds of various battle cries fill the air in the multiple languages spoken by the combatants; heathen cannot be distinguished from Christian, nor friend from foe; all communication breaks down into a cacophony of mutually unintelligible languages. An environment of such linguistic diversity, the narrator implies above, is fraught with problems of communication and recognition. At first glance, the story of Willehalm falls into the generic category of heroic epic, but it also contains elements of a legend and of a saint's life.2 It is the German version of the French chanson Bataille d'Aliscans, and it tells the story of two great battles fought by the Margrave Willehalm of Oransche against the onslaught of immense heathen armies. As the story commences, the heathens are pursuing the hero in retaliation for his escape from captivity in Arabia and for his abduction of his captor's wife Arabel, who has converted to Christianity, been baptized as Gyburg, and married Willehalm. When Willehalm's army is overwhelmed, he is forced to seek out support from King Lays of the Roman Empire. During his brief and conflict-ridden stay at the imperial court, which ultimately results in his achieving the necessary support, Willehalm encounters Rennewart, a heathen boy of superhuman strength who agrees to fight for him against the heathen armies. Loys informs Willehalm that he purchased the boy from two merchants, and that although he is of noble birth, he is banished to the kitchens because he refuses to convert to Christianity Only the audience is aware that Rennewart is Gyburg's brother. With Rennewart's help, the Christians ultimately overcome the heathen armies led by Gyburg's father Terramer and her former husband Tybalt. On the face of it, the story of Willehalm thus presents us with a conflict between Saracens and Christians in which Christianity ultimately reigns triumphant. Seventy-eight extant manuscripts and fragments of the poem bear testimony to an active medieval reception of the story. Indeed, in the entire corpus of medieval German vernacular literature, the number of Willehalm manuscripts is superseded only by the number of Parzival manuscripts. Medieval extensions and reworkings of the tale further attest to a sustained interest in the poem. From the thirteenth through the fifteenth century, Wolfram's Willehalm appears in codices beside heroic and spiritual tales. It is co-opted into chronicles, such as Heinrich von Munchen's Weltchronik and, from the end of the thirteenth century on, it is most frequently embedded in a trilogy, providing the centerpiece between a prelude by Ulrich von dem Turlin (Arbel) and a continuation by Ulrich von Turheim (Rennewart). The fact that Wolfram's Willehalm is the most frequently and richly illustrated text in the medieval German vernacular tradition is further evidence of its tremendous popularity.3 Although for many years largely ignored, in the last decade a resurgence of interest in W//halm has resulted in productive scholarly debate on many of the thematic and structural elements of the poem. …

Competences in education: a confusion of tongues

Competences in education: a confusion of tongues

Competences in education: A confusion of tongues

There is a growing interest in the concept of 'competence learning' in various areas of education, training and professional development. Competences are commonly assumed to represent more than the levels of knowledge and skills and to account for the effective application of available knowledge and skills in a specific context. But, with this trend, the term 'competence' is being used in many different ways. How are competencies thought to relate to knowledge, skills and attitudes, and what meaning and validity do various claims about competences have? The competence concept is quite troublesome, and it is argued that the term has no significance beyond that which is associated with the term 'skills'.

La Tour de Babel dans le commentaire de Bahya ben Asher (XIIIe siècle)

In order to present the various orientations of Jewish exegesis at the end of XIII-th century, R. Bahya ben Asher has been chosen , whose commentary reflects all the facets of medieval Jewish exegesis well. The motif of Babel's Tower, with its interrogation concerning the nature of the fault committed by the people of this generation as well as the problem of the multiplication of languages, appeared to us to furnish an adequate illustration of its method.

Language as a confounding variable in the diagnosis of misconceptions

The study reported in this paper examines the possibility that language confusion can be mistaken for misconception. A written test, consisting of 20 multiple choice items that had been used by other authors to diagnose misconceptions in physics was administered to a sample of matric level, English first language, South African students. A sub-sample of these subjects was then interviewed to explore the reasoning behind their choices in the written test. An analysis of the interviews showed that in several cases, distractors were chosen by subjects who did not hold the target misconceptions the items were intended to diagnose, and that language usage, for example misinterpretation of the question text, was frequently the reason behind the choices. The findings indicate that caution is needed in interpreting students' responses to multiple choice questions.

Ferenczi's “Confusion of Tongues” Theory and the Analysis of the Incest Trauma

The tender-mother transference of Ferenczi's humanistic analytic orientation was as important an advance in pioneering times as was Kohut's selfobject transference in contemporary psychoanalysis. Ferenczi's clinical theory and method began a focus on pre-oedipal experiences, which eventually became an alternate to the oedipal theory. Freud was critical of Ferenczi's formulation, leading a successful attempt to suppress his work and remove it from mainstream psychoanalysis because he believed it was “regressive.” In actuality, Ferenczi's “Confusion of Tongues” theory and “Relaxation Therapy” were prophetic and pioneering attempts to understand and treat the incest trauma (ironically the clinical data upon which Freud founded psychoanalysis 100 years ago). In the case of Miss T., Ferenczi's ideas are applied to the contemporary analysis of the incest trauma.

The Youngest Case of Pervasive Refusal Syndrome?

To date, the youngest previously recorded case of pervasive refusal syndrome (PRS) was eight years old. A four-year-old Australian-born Chinese boy presented to a tertiary paediatric referral centre with a four-week history of food refusal and selective mutism; he was severely dehydrated and marasmic. During admission several behavioural problems were noted including: persistent refusal to eat or drink, obsessions with images of food, failure to cooperate, lack of social interaction and toileting in inappropriate places. There were features of early maternal separation, concerns over the quality of parenting and confusion of language and culture. An exhaustive assessment (to exclude an organic explanation) by a multi- disciplinary team was completed. All investigations were normal with the exception of the single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) scan, which showed mild increase uptake to the right insular and mild decrease uptake to the right temporal region. He was hospitalized for 67 days over which time his medical difficulties resolved. The differential diagnosis included an organic disease, child abuse, an eating disorder, a degenerative disorder, reactive attachment disorder, pervasive developmental disorder and a psychotic disorder, which were all considered. We felt that this case fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for PRS and was the youngest reported case. The similarity of the SPECT scan result with that found in anorexia nervosa is of interest and suggests that there is a neurobiological vulnerability common to this group of disorders.

A confusion of tongues: competence, insanity, psychiatry, and the law.

Psychiatrists share with the public some confusion and uncertainty about two highly visible forensic psychiatric examinations: competence to stand trial and criminal responsibility (insanity). The author reviews the content and context of these examinations, examines legal issues that define and underlie them, and clarifies commonly encountered areas of ambiguity and misunderstanding. The competence examination, which assesses a defendant's ability to participate in the trial process, focuses on the present state of the defendant's mental capacities. Two standards generally used are whether the defendant has a rational and factual understanding of the charges and penalties and has the ability to cooperate with the defense attorney. The examination for insanity is one of the most challenging and comprehensive in forensic psychiatry. The criteria in general address the defendant's awareness of the fact that the act was illegal, wrong, or a crime. Additional criteria address the defendant's ability to control behavior.

Ferenczi's Rise and Fall from “Analytic Grace”: The Ferenczi Renaissance Revisited

In the last 20 years a Ferenczi Renaissance has been slowly building. There has been a rediscovery of the significance of Sándor Ferenczi, who can be considered the clinical genius of psychoanalysis. The politics of psychoanalysis led to the suppression of Ferenczi's ideas, removing his influence from psychoanalysis for about 50 years. Ferenczi's ideas and methods significantly deviated from his mentor, Sigmund Freud; he offered an alternative theory, “The Confusion of Tongues” and a new method, “Relaxation Therapy.” Ferenczi's pioneering contributions to analytic therapy include: the introduction of empathy into the analytic relationship; the curative function of the relationship in the analytic encounter; the role of activity in analytic therapy; the importance of non-interpretative behavior by the analyst; the function of the experiential and emotional dimensions in analytic therapy; analyst self-disclosure; and mutual analysis.

From Ferenczi to Kohut: from confusion of tongues to self-object.

From Ferenczi to Kohut: from confusion of tongues to self-object.

The Double Voice of Metaphor: A. S. Byatt's "Morpho Eugenia"

Analogy is slippery tool. A. S. Byatt (100) The double voice of postmodern fiction presents challenge because it requires that we question the way we read and interpret not only postmodern literature but also literature as whole. [1] This doubleness is particularly noticeable in works that openly display their affiliation with generic conventions or older works, such as J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), which rewrites Robinson Crusoe, Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985), which is structured like detective story, or A. S. Byatt's Possession (1990), Lindsay Clarke's The Chymical Wedding (1989), John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), and Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover (1992), which all build on romance conventions. Such doubleness resembles allegory, insofar as allegory defines the moment when one text is read through the lens of another (Owens Pt. 1, 68). By thus allying themselves with previous texts in their genres and by fusing conventional and postmodern narrative strategies, these literary hybrids destabilize our interpretations of trad itional works, and, at least in the case of the postmodern romances, manage both to reread their tradition and revitalize its twentieth-century appearance. [2] Thus the multiple narrative voices, the open contradictions, and the consistent resistance to totalizing answers in postmodern romance like Possession can be seen as continuing the allegorical mode of the high romances of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as questioning the apparent uniformity of women's popular romances, and as restoring those complex and sophisticated qualities that formerly characterized the romance but seem to have disappeared from its twentieth-century manifestations. Even though Possession in its parodies of scholars influenced by French feminism and Lacanian psychoanalysis contains fair amount of critique of poststructuralist and postmodern attitudes, it signals its own postmodernity through devices like fluctuating narrative perspectives, paradox, ambiguity, and self-reflexivity. The short stories in Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994) can also be categorized as postmodern fictions, especially through the inclusion of magic and fairy-tale structures in apparently realistic tales, and the disjunctive narrative style of Babel Tower (1996) is another example of Byatt's interest in postmodern literary techniques. Works like these, which openly display their postmodern links, need to be approached in way that can acknowledge the multiple meanings produced. Works that at least on the surface look like straightforward narratives might appear to be another matter. But are they? Consider the novella Morpho Eugenia in Byatt's Angels and Insects. In contrast t o Possession, Morpho Eugenia is firmly set in the past, and there is no visible twentieth-century perspective in the telling. The story is mainly told by omniscient narrator, and even though it is interspersed with fictional texts ostensibly written by the various characters in the novella, these do not represent different voices and shifting perspectives to the extent they do in Possession. Morpho Eugenia opens like women's historical romance and continues like novel about love, marriage, society's expectations, nineteenth-century hypocrisy, social injustices, Darwin, and religion. Because the stories in Angels and Insects are set in the 1860s and 1870s and deal with concerns, reviewers have described the diptych as resolutely mid-Victorian in tone and content (Hughes 49), and A. S. Byatt as a Victorianist Iris Murdoch (Butler). The postmodern connection is consequently overlooked. One reviewer, however, sees continuities between the novel and postmodernism when he refers to Byatt as postmodem Victorian who finds the grounds of her postmodernity in an earnest attempt to get back before the moderns and revive project that has never been allowed to come to completion (Levenson 41). …

Judicious Self-Disclosure by the Psychoanalyst

One of Sándor Ferenczi's greatest contributions to clinical theory and method is his pioneering concept of analyst self-disclosure. First introduced in his famous paper ?The elasticity of psycho-analytic technique? (1928), analyst self-disclosure changed the nature of clinical interaction between analyst and analysand, from the Freudian model of a surgeon to the responsiveness of an empathic mother. Ferenczi's clinical work with the so-called ?difficult cases? (narcissistic, borderline and psychotic disorders) moved him to discover the ethos of activity within an empathic method. Analyst self-disclosure is one of those responsive measures he developed to address the deficits in communication and interpersonal functioning in trauma survivors. An outline is presented of the ?Confusion of Tongues? which is the model from which self-disclosure is derived. A contemporary extension of this idea is offered in the clinical and theoretical distinction between judicious vs. conspicuous self-disclosure.

Echoes of Translation: Reading Between Texts (review)

Reviewed by: Echoes of Translation: Reading Between Texts Susan Bernofsky Rainer Nägele, Echoes of Translation: Reading Between Texts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. vii + 143 pages. Echo, echoes, echolalia are at the heart of Rainer Nägele’s Echoes of Translation: Reading Between Texts, a highly personal and compelling meditation on the nature of reading. This is a book that everywhere rejects the trappings of academic discourse. Its chapters are “essays,” Nägele tells us, in the most literal sense, attempts at demonstrating a praxis of reading that emerges “not from a rejection of theory, not from the phantasm of an innocence free of theory, but from the impossibility of theory in the kernel of theory” (13). Nägele as a reader is as sensitive and imaginative as he is astute, and the pages of this slim volume are full of the pleasures of following the associations of a mind thoroughly steeped in Western philosophy and literature. As a work on reading it is in no way prescriptive (and thus not strictly speaking theoretical) but rather exemplary: a demonstration of the tools that history, philosophy, linguistics, etymology, theology and sheer imaginative bravura have to offer. The echoes of Nägele’s title, these “reflexes and resonances in the confusion of languages” (8), refer not only to the happy multiplicity of tongues in “Babel heureuse” (Barthes) but also to a view of literary history that sees texts as things to be read between—read, that is, for their shared resonances, motifs, themes. Translation, as Nägele uses the term, encompasses various forms of transmission, transformation, and inheritance. These essays circle around a narrowly circumscribed canon of authors: Benjamin, Baudelaire, Kafka, Brecht, Nietzsche, Freud, Sophocles, and above all Hölderlin. Nägele offers a personal explanation for why these texts chose him as their reader. But of course this selection of authors at the same time makes his book a study of the origins of modernity, and if Hölderlin’s poems provide the crux to which these readings return again and again, it is because in their lines Nägele locates a radical transformation of the romantic idea of consciousness whose rejection was to mark the most important twentieth-century writing as well as reading. Central to Nägele’s praxis of reading is the notion of the constellation: of texts, images, words, syntactical elements; for when “[t]otalities are broken into pieces, [...] the broken pieces enter into readable constellations.” The [End Page 1174] term comes from Benjamin, where it appears in various contexts, for example in the Wahlverwandtschaften essay, where it is used to describe both the relationship and the difference between “idea” and “phenomenon” (“Ideas are related to things as the constellations of the stars to the stars” [25]). The recognition of the constellation is also its construction, thus the project of literary reception, of reading, as a creative and active process. Assembling a constellation of exemplary texts is of necessity the task of an individual reader, yet Nägele is careful to distance his work from any lax or self-indulgent mode of subjectivity. Acknowledging that by beginning “where a trace is felt as an impact” his project risks being associated with “utter subjectivism,” he cautions against mistaking his relation to these texts as one of “empathy” (Einfühlung). The critique of empathy with which he allies himself is a constitutive feature of modernist writing, central to a tradition that has detached itself from the romantic legacy of Reflexion. Romantic reflection—with its motifs of circularity, of departing only to return, including in its scope the spiral path of Hegel’s consciousness—has its “most virulent” culmination, Nägele reminds us, in a European anti-Semitism that constructs the Jewish spirit in terms of “an originary leave-taking without return” (6). Nägele’s presentation assigns a salutary moral weight to modernism’s “deflection and rupture in the movement of (self-)consciousness and reflection” (6). The figure of this deflected and ruptured reflection is echo, a ghostly version of reflection in which the reiteration is at the same time a diminishing: the return marks the reiterated object’s loss. Echo is also a specifically aural figure...

Still life and the rounding of consciousness

1was published in 1985, the second of a projected quartet of novels charting the life and environs of her feisty intellectual heroine, Frederica Potter. The first novel in the tetralogy, The Virgin in the Garden, 2 follows Frederica through her late school years at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II, and draws together floral, classical, and Tudor imagery into a rich metaphoric weave. Still Life, though, may be savoured independently of its predecessor, or of the third in the series, Babel Tower, 3 in which Frederica is quite literally pursued through the London arts scene of the 1960s. In this essay, I aim to give readers a taste of the vast range of ideas Byatt deals with in Still Life. I shall also give examples of the manner in which she presents and comments on these ideas. My hope is to entice readers to experience Byatt’s writing for themselves. I shall then explore two of the main themes of Still Life, and relate these themes to contemporary medical training and practice.

Enactments that don't appear as enactments.

Enactments That Don't Appear as EnactmentsSilvana Koen and Maria Teresa Bertozzi RoveriSilvana KoenSilvana Koen, Via Fra’ Bartolomeo 5, 20146 Milano, ItaliaSearch for more papers by this author and Maria Teresa Bertozzi Roveri1 Faculty, Coirag School of Psychotherapy; Private practice.2 Private practice.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:July 2017https://doi.org/10.1521/jaap.1.1998.26.1.85PDFPDF PLUS ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations AboutReferencesBowlby J. (1973), Attachment and Loss Vol. 2: Separation: Anxiety and Anger, Basic Books, New York. Google ScholarDavies J. M., and Frawley M. G. (1994). Treating the Adult Survivor of Childhood Sexual Abuse. A Psychoanalytic Perspective, Basic Books, New York. Google ScholarFerenczi S. (1980), Confusion of tongues between adults and the child, in Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis, Maresfield Reprints, London. (Original work published 1933). Google ScholarFoulkes S. H. (1990), The group as a matrix of the individual's mental life, in Selected Papers, Karnac Books, London. (Original work published 1973) Google ScholarGill M. M. (1983), The interpersonal paradigm and the degree of the therapist's involvement, Contemp. Psychoanal., 19, 200–237. Crossref, Google Scholar Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 26Issue 1Mar 1998 Information© 1998 The American Academy of PsychoanalysisPDF download

Ferenczi's trauma theory.

Ferenczi's Trauma Theory Jay B. Frankel, Ph.D. Trauma was at the heart of Sandor Ferenczi's clinical concerns. Toward the end of his life, he became convinced that trauma was an important cause of much neurotic and character pathology, despite the fact that traumatic factors were generally neglected by other analysts (1933, p. 156).’ Ferenczi's final ideas about trauma were presented in very brief form—“a short extract” (1933, p. 156), as he said—in his final paper, “Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child.” He intended to expand, develop, and reevaluate these ideas (Balint, 1958), but soon after he wrote this paper he became too ill to do so, and after several months he died. However, Ferenczi had published other papers that dealt with trauma, notably during the First World War on “war neurosis” (1916/17), and much later in his papers on relaxation technique (1929, 1930, 1931). In his last years, he also made many notes to himself on his ideas about trauma, among other topics, which were posthumously gathered together and published in the third volume of his collected papers (1955) under the title, “Notes and Fragments” (1920 and 1930-1932). These “Notes and Fragments” flank his Clinical Diary (1932), which was written between January and October 1932 but not published until 1985 (and not until 1988 in English), and which contains many additional clinical observations and ideas about trauma. The present paper will attempt to bring together all of Ferenczi's writings about trauma and to present them in a concise, integrated, and organized way.

Línguas bárbaras e peregrinas do Novo Mundo segundo os gramáticos jesuítas: uma concepção de universalidade no estudo de línguas estrangeiras1

In this paper I explore the reflection of the religious context in the concept of universal grammar as it is presented in four missionary grammars written by Jesuit priests in Brazil: Anchieta (1595), Figueira (1621?), Dias (1697) e Mamiani (1699). In the last few decades linguists have seen the return of the expression universal grammar to the literature, as a consequence of the influence of Noam Chomsky’s work. The hypothesis of a common core for all languages has its roots in a tradition which goes back to the Middle Ages. In the Christian West it was thought that the endowment given by God to Adam was uncovered by the confusion of tongues, as a punishment for the Tower of Babel. Therefore the concept of universality in those grammars has its grounds in a very different framework from the chomskyan UG. Abstract In this paper I explore the reflection of the religious context in the concept of universal grammar as it is presented in four missionary grammars written by Jesuit priests in Brazil: Anchieta (1595), Figueira (1621?), Dias (1697) e Mamiani (1699). In the last few decades linguists have seen the return of the expression universal grammar to the literature, as a consequence of the influence of Noam Chomsky’s work. The hypothesis of a common core for all languages has its roots in a tradition which goes back to the Middle Ages. In the Christian West it was thought that the endowment given by God to Adam was uncovered by the confusion of tongues, as a punishment for the Tower of Babel. Therefore the concept of universality in those grammars has its grounds in a very different framework from the chomskyan UG.