Abstract: . . .  psycholinguistics Page 1 PLINX204 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS LANGUAGE ACQUISITION – 2006 - 2 Linguistic evidence (1) Universals Pullum & Scholz, 2002; Smith, 2005: ch. 9. Poverty of the Stimulus Scholz & Pullum, 2002; Newmeyer, 1998: 84-89 (Critical periods Smith, 2002: ch. 16.) 1. Universals It is claimed that there are universals of language and that the only plausible explanation for their existence is that they are ‘innate’ or in some way genetically determined. Examples: a. Vocabulary : Phonological, Syntactic and Semantic – Consonants and Vowels; Nouns and Verbs; Agents and Patients. b. Constituency and hierarchical structure – X-bar theory; c-command. Linguists may disagree about the respective merits of (e.g.) constituency and dependency, but no-one postulates constituency for one language and dependency for another. c. Architecture Whatever framework is postulated for one language is exploited for all other languages – e.g. levels of representation; ‘Binding’, ‘Case’, ‘Theta-theory’, etc. These change… d. Principles and Parameters : Structure dependency, Island constraints. e. Implicational : e.g. Greenbergian ‘universals’ (Greenberg, 1963). . . .
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