{"id":129,"date":"2010-01-18T07:52:44","date_gmt":"2010-01-18T15:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/?p=129"},"modified":"2010-01-18T07:52:44","modified_gmt":"2010-01-18T15:52:44","slug":"universal-grammar-and-linguistic-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/universal-grammar-and-linguistic-evolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Universal Grammar and Linguistic Evolution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Okay, first off. I don&#8217;t know how familiar people are with the concept of Universal Grammar, but I&#8217;ll try to boil it down and give you a straightforward version. UG is composed of all things that are common to all human languages. This is not confined to spoken languages (ie, it includes sign language, which interestingly does seem to share many features with spoken language) but makes no attempts to explain orthography.<\/p>\n<p>Now, here&#8217;s my point. If we&#8217;ve got UG, and we assume that there are certain features shared between languages that are selected for depending on the environment and the sociopolitical landscape (as some linguists have done, notably <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pyoudeyer.com\/oudeyer-kaplan-cp07.pdf\"> Oudeyer and Kaplan<\/a>), UG probably won&#8217;t consist of a series of features, per se, since (by definition) those features will vary depending on where you are in the world. To assume otherwise would be rather like assuming that all organisms must consist of certain genes in order to be organisms.<\/p>\n<p>What UG would consist of is rather what all those various linguistic features have in common, not just those things shared by successful features. If the linguistic features are genes, UG would therefore be analogous to the base pairs that compose all DNA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Okay, first off. I don&#8217;t know how familiar people are with the concept of Universal Grammar, but I&#8217;ll try to boil it down and give you a straightforward version. UG is composed of all things that are common to all human languages. This is not confined to spoken languages (ie, it includes sign language, which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7061,568,2073,7108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-extra-readings","category-language","category-week-2","category-weekly-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1610"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}