Universal Grammar in Second-Language Acquisition

A History

Margaret Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134388530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

From the ancient Mediterranean world to the present day, our conceptions of what is universal in language have interacted with our experiences of language learning. This book tells two stories: the story of how scholars in the west have conceived of the fact that human languages share important properties despite their obvious differences, and the story of how westerners have understood the nature of second or foreign language learning.
In narrating these two stories, the author argues that modern second language acquisition theory needs to reassess what counts as its own past. The book addresses Greek contributions to the prehistory of universal grammar, Roman bilingualism, the emergence of the first foreign language grammars in the early Middle Ages, and the Medieval speculative grammarians efforts to define the essentials of human language. The author shows how after the renaissance expanded people's awareness of language differences, scholars returned to the questions of universals in the context of second language learning, including in the 1660 Port-Royal grammar which Chomsky notoriously celebrated in Cartesian Linguistics. The book then looks at how Post-Saussurean European linguistics and American structuralism up to modern generative grammar have each differently conceived of universals and language learning.
Universal Grammar in Second Language Acquisition is a remarkable contribution to the history of linguistics and will be essential reading for students and scholars of linguistics, specialists in second language acquisition and language teacher-educators.

1
INTRODUCTION

This book recounts a history of two sets of ideas. One set of ideas has at its centre the term ‘universal grammar’, a name enduringly applied in western linguistic tradition to the notion that human languages necessarily share important, formative, properties. The other set of ideas has at its centre an experience, namely the experience of acquisition of a second or foreign language. In the innumerable generations during which humans have participated in varieties of this experience, or observed others doing so, many people have been moved to speculate about its nature. These speculations–sometimes explicitly worked out as proposals about adult language learning, sometimes implicit in records of how languages have been learned and taught–form a second set of ideas, a history of which is recounted in this text. I am in particular interested in points of intersection between universal grammar and foreign language learning. From the ancient world up to around the sixteenth century, the focus is on Europe and the Mediterranean area. Since the 1500s, work historically rooted in Europe has been carried out in various parts of the world, so the geographical locus becomes more diffuse from that time up to the present day.

Some basic definitions

One of the ambitions of this text is to describe the several incarnations of universal grammar over the course of many centuries. Another is to describe the western heritage of ideas about second language acquisition. In neither case is there a continuous thread of development, with the discoveries and the reflections of one age always building neatly on those of the previous generation. In particular, the concept of universal grammar has fallen out of intellectual fashion several times, and on being revived, emerged in different guises. During some periods competing concepts of universal grammar have existed side-by-side. Second language learning has likewise been variously construed. But even granted this diversity, it is possible (and, in fact, necessary) to have from the start a working sense of what these two terms have referred to.

‘Universal grammar’

The fundamental insight captured by the expression ‘universal grammar’ is that human languages have significant properties in common despite their obvious differences. The term ‘universal grammar’, along with a related term (sometimes used synonymously), ‘general grammar’, did not have much currency before the early seventeenth century.¹ However, versions of the idea which this term labels–versions more or less developed, more or less explicitly articulated–go farther back in western linguistic tradition. It is useful to start with some illustrations of how participants in this tradition have talked about commonalities among languages.

In 1270 Roger Bacon wrote that ‘grammar is substantially one and the same in all languages, despite its accidental variations’.² Although Bacon’s words are frequently quoted as an early exposition of universal grammar, several recent historiographical studies have shown them in a different light, an issue addressed in Chapter 4. I cite Bacon here because, legitimately or illegitimately, many people since his day have taken his statement to present ‘most clearly and unconditionally the basic principle of universal grammar’ (Hovdhaugen 1990: 118). During the Middle Ages following Bacon’s day, one language–Latin–achieved a preeminent intellectual and social position. Medieval grammarians valued Latin as a unique reflection of human cognition and the structure of reality, and so projected the west’s first explicit notion of what is essential to language from the categories and features of Latin.

After a period of dormancy during the Renaissance, an array of concepts of universal grammar emerged which were no longer yoked to Latin. Rather, grammarians opposed what is universal in human languages to the ‘particular’ or ‘special’ properties which distinguish one language from another. Johann Heinrich Alsted defined ‘general grammar’ in his 1630 Encyclopedia as ‘the pattern [norma] of every particular grammar’ (Salmon 1969: 171). The British grammarian John Wilkins (1668: 297–8) contrasted ‘Natural Grammar (which may likewise be stiled Philosophical, Rational, and Universal)’, with ‘Instituted and Particular Grammar’. The former ‘should contain all such Grounds and Rules, as do naturally and necessarily belong to the Philosophy of letters and speech in the General ‘, whereas the latter ‘doth deliver the rules which are proper and peculiar to any one Language in Particular’. To Wilkins, the job of grammarians was to evade being ‘prejudiced by the common Theory of the languages they [are] acquainted with [so that they may] abstract their rules according to Nature’. In France, scholars speculated about language commonalities and differences, most famously in the 1660 Grammaire Générale et Raisonnée. This text, and others of its genre, argued for a rationalist basis for universal grammar, and tried to work out what it would mean to learn a language granted the roots of general grammar in human cognition.

By the end of the eighteenth century, scholars under the influence of nationalism and romanticism shifted their attention away from similarities across languages to the characteristics of individual languages. Universal grammar remained in retreat as comparative-historical and typological studies of languages flourished in the 1800s. Then at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ferdinand de Saussure asserted that languages could, and should, be studied as autonomous systems independent of their histories. Historians conventionally take Saussure as the starting-point of autonomous or structuralist linguistics, which extends to the present day. In the United States, structuralism is usually represented as having developed a decidedly anti-universalist trend in the first half of the twentieth century. To this era belongs Martin Joos’ famous representation of the ‘American (Boas) tradition’ as one which holds that ‘languages could differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways’ (1957: 96)–an assertion which seems to be cited about equally as often as Bacon’s seminal thirteenth-century assertion to the contrary. (And, as in the case of Bacon’s words, we will return to whether the conventional interpretation of Joos’ statement is justified.)

The kind of extreme anti-universalism which Joos is taken to attribute to early American structuralism has been reconsidered in the last half of the twentieth century. By the 1970s, there were two schools of research centrally concerned with discovering and specifying language universals. One school is associated with the linguistic anthropologist Joseph Greenberg. Greenberg and his colleagues have endeavoured to identify characteristics which are shared across human languages through comparison of (for example) the array of their phonemes, word order facts, or morphological properties. The approach is to analyse the features of many typologically different languages, to discern their common features and the relationships which hold across those features. This represents one modern concept of how to define universal grammar.

A second school is identified with Noam Chomsky. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Chomsky started reconstructing a concept of universal grammar within generative linguistics as a ‘system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages not merely by accident but by necessity’ (1975: 29). According to Chomsky, universal grammar is a theory of innate principles that constitute the starting point of language acquisition, ‘the “initial state” of the language learner, hence the basis on which knowledge of language develops’ (1980: 69). ‘All languages are cut to the same pattern’ (Chomsky 1965: 30), because universal grammar defines what is linguistically possible and impossible. The job of the linguist is to discover the pattern, that is, to recognize and specify the contents of universal grammar. Chomsky and others working with him have developed this version of universal grammar to an unprecedented level of formal precision. Research into child language plays a key role in generative linguistics, because it is argued that children exhibit knowledge of language which cannot have been derived by observation of, or by induction from, their linguistic environment. To paraphrase Chomsky, such knowledge is not merely accidental, but necessary; and therefore study of what child learners bring to the task of language learning provides insight into the contents of universal grammar.

It is appropriate to have concluded this sketch of the history of universal grammar by citing Chomsky’s version of the idea. This is the perspective of much modern discussion of universal grammar as well as second language learning, and thus familiar to some of the readership of this text. One of the tasks of this text is to examine the historical context of Chomskyan universal grammar. It will sometimes be convenient to compare generative and other versions of universal grammar, even at the risk of distorting earlier language science. Such comparison does not assume that Chomskyan linguistics in some way culminates inquiry into universal grammar. Rather, it simply recognizes that generative universal grammar is a useful shared starting point for many readers of this text, as for its author.

In any case, despite the evident differences in views of universal grammar from Bacon to Chomsky, one striking motif is the persistent contrast between the terms ‘necessary’ (or ‘essential’) and ‘accidental’, perhaps echoing Aristotle’s use of these words in discussing the nature of scientific inquiry. Attributed to universal grammar are those parts or properties of human language that are necessarily present, that is, which form the definitive or essential features of language, granted that such properties have been conceptualized differently in different periods. Features of a given language not governed by universal grammar are characterized as ‘accidental’, with their presence or absence not crucial to the general definition of a human language.³

There is, of course, much more to the interlocking sets of hypotheses, speculations and assertions which have gone by the name ‘universal grammar’, but a distinction between necessary and accidental properties is intrinsic to many of them. It is also a distinction whose status within generative linguistics is sometimes misunderstood. For example, G. Steiner (1992: 104) characterizes ‘Chomskian universalism’ as holding that ‘Differences between languages represent differences of “surface structure” only. They are accidents of the terrain which impress the eye but tell us scarcely anything of the underlying “deep structure” ‘.⁴ On these grounds Steiner claims that ‘The axiom of universal deep structures … entails inevitably a relegation to accident, to superficiality, of the facts of linguistic multiplicity and difference’ (pp. xiv–xv). What Steiner misconstrues is that from a generative perspective, differences between languages may be ‘accidents’ with respect to universal grammar, without making them uninformative or theoretically ‘superficial’. How languages differ can reveal a lot about how they are alike. A version of generative grammar prevalent in the 1980s, the ‘principles and parameters’ framework, attempts to specify invariant properties (the ‘principles’) of grammar in relation to properties that exhibit constrained cross-linguistic variation (properties following from the setting of ‘parameters’). ‘Accidental’ properties need to be distinguished from those that are ‘necessary’, but what is ‘accidental’ is not unnecessary to the construction of a universal grammar.

For the benefit of readers encountering the concept of universal grammar for the first time, it may be useful to specify what the term does not refer to. First, it does not refer exclusively to ‘grammar’ in its narrow sense, that is, to syntax. Rather, ‘grammar’ is conventionally extended to include many domains of language: phonology, the lexicon, morphology and semantics, as well as syntax. Second, although ‘grammar’ and ‘language’ are sometimes assigned partially overlapping senses, ‘universal grammar’ is conceptually distinct from ‘universal language’. This text narrates a history of ideas about what has been assumed (or postulated) to be shared across human languages, using this descriptor as a minimal common denominator among different senses of the term ‘universal grammar’. In contrast, Eco (1995) chronicles how the term ‘universal language’ has been used to refer to linguistic systems created, or reconstructed, as ‘perfect’ in one of several ways. For example, invented languages like Esperanto, which aspire to overcome the social or political consequences of linguistic diversity, have sometimes been called ‘universal languages’ (Salmon 1996a). Another sense of the term ‘universal language’ is that which some Judeo-Christian traditions consider to have been employed in the biblical act of creation, or by humans before the collapse of the Tower of Babel. Philosophers have also sought to find or to create a ‘universal language’ in a third sense, namely, a language able ‘to express ideas perfectly and to discover thereby new connections between the diverse aspects of reality’ (Eco 1995: 3). In some instances, the history of universal grammar abuts or intersects with the history of universal languages in these senses. But the two concepts are distinct.

‘Second language acquisition’

The other object of inquiry in this book, the conceptualization of foreign language acquisition, also needs to be specified in some preliminary manner. The experience of learning a language other than one’s native tongue has probably been available to at least some people within every western culture from the ancient world to the present day (Lewis 1976). But in the last twenty years, terms for describing that experience have been refined to point out several purported distinctions. One such distinction is between adult versus child learners, with questions about the significance of this difference having been debated for centuries and continuing to be controversial.⁵ I observe this distinction, assuming that there may indeed be essential differences between adult and child language learning. This book is concerned most centrally with adult learners, although information about the acquisition of second languages in childhood, as well as about children’s acquisition of a first language, often enters the narrative. A second distinction which contemporary research has sometimes maintained is that between ‘second languages’ (or ‘L2s’) and ‘foreign languages’. A ‘second language’ refers to a language learned in a context where it is used natively in the surrounding culture (regardless of whether it is a true second language [L2] to the learner, or actually a third [L3], fourth [L4], etc.). In contrast, a ‘foreign language’ refers to a language learned, for example, in an educational setting where some other language is employed natively outside the classroom. It is unclear exactly what, if any, consequences follow from this difference (R. Ellis 1994: 214–216). In this text I will refer indiscriminately to a non-natively acquired language as a ‘foreign’ or a ‘second language’ (abbreviated as ‘L2’).

Definitions of the terms ‘acquisition’ and ‘learning’ have likewise been debated. I use them as synonyms, setting aside Krashen’s (1981) distinction between naturalistic, untutored, ‘acquisition’ and the instructed ‘learning’ which takes place in a classroom, because I am concerned broadly with the experience of adults encountering a non-native language and with how that experience has been understood, regardless of the context in which the encounter takes place. (I also set aside the somewhat overlapping issue of implicit versus explicit learning (N. C. Ellis 1994).) In research on children, some generativists in the last twenty years have rejected both the terms ‘learning’ and ‘acquisition’ in favour of ‘language growth’ as better representing Chomsky’s view that control over a native language appears as ‘a “language organ” … that develops under strong, discrete genetic and epigenetic constraints’ within the child’s mind (Marshall 1987: 47).⁶ Whether a second language can also be best represented as ‘growing’ in the mind of an adult is controversial. Some writers (e.g. Strozer 1994: xii) find neither ‘learning’ nor ‘acquisition’ fully satisfactory with respect to adults, but I will prescind from the debate to employ both terms interchangeably.

Three caveats

Continuity and discontinuity in notions of universal grammar

Three caveats are in order. First, the sketch given above demonstrates that the fundamental insight captured by the term ‘universal grammar’ has been elaborated variously, weaving in and out of western language science. The source of universal grammar has also been construed variously. Medieval grammarians believed universal grammar to follow from the facts of the phenomenal world; they presumed it to be ‘dependent upon the structure of the world of reality’ (Bursill-Hall 1963: 46). Some scholars in the seventeenth century identified universal grammar with mental concepts to which language applies linguistic labels. Chomsky (1980: 56–65) locates the seat of universal grammar in an innate computational, not conceptual, faculty, and argues that (generative) universal grammar is what it is because of human genetics.

In these ways, universal grammar has been conceived differently along several dimensions. Moreover, not all periods have been preoccupied with universal grammar. People reflecting on linguistic issues in some eras have simply denied that languages have significant shared properties, or they have assumed that universal grammar exists but neglected it in favour of attending to differences among languages. Nevertheless, the idea of universal grammar arose early in western language science, and there is enough continuity to trace its several metamorphoses. Robins (1973: 17) characterized ‘the problem of linguistic universals in relation to the obvious surface differences of language structure’ as one which ‘in different forms has beset linguists ever since [the Middle Ages]’. Itkonen (1991: 165) goes farther, declaring that ‘the history of Western linguistics has to a very large extent been a history of the notion of universal grammar’ (emphasis in the original). Coseriu (1974: 47) gives maximum scope to the idea, arguing that all linguistic inquiry implicitly presupposes some notion of language universals. To ask about any language ‘What are its phonemes?’ or ‘What grammatical categories appear?’ is, to Coseriu, to accept in advance that that language, like all others, has phonemes and grammatical categories. But however central a role one might posit for universal grammar–or whether one attends more to rejection of universal grammar–it is important to recognize a certain instability of concepts of its nature, contents and source through the history of western linguistics. Brekle (1986) points out that the notion of ‘linguistics’ has to be historically relativized to make the study of its past possible. Similarly, ‘universal grammar’ has to be repeatedly re-defined to reflect the interests of different periods.

Explicit and implicit concepts of second language learning

A second caveat concerns the other focus of this text, second language acquisition. Foreign language learning has taken place in one way or another in most cultures. At the very least, virtually all cultures have recognized the existence of foreign languages.⁷ But not every society has sufficiently valued foreign language learning to reflect on its own assumptions about what it means to learn another language, or what constitutes knowledge of an L2. Moreover, not every society left records of whatever such reflection did take place. Some of this information can be pieced together from references to language learning and learners, or deduced from pedagogical records. But pedagogy does not always faithfully represent contemporary thinking (or even unconscious assumptions) about the nature o...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• 2: ANCIENT GREECE AND ROME
• 3: LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE LEARNING FROM LATE ANTIQUITY TO THE CAROLINGIAN RENAISSANCE
• 4: THE MIDDLE AGES
• 5: FROM DISCOVERY OF THE PARTICULAR TO SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY UNIVERSAL LANGUAGES
• 6: GENERAL GRAMMAR THROUGH THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
• 7: CONCEPTUALIZATION OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR AND SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
• 8: AFTERWORD
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY