Ray Jackendoff
Oxford University Press, 2002
However, non-universal aspects of linguistic structure may be candidates for Universal Grammar as well. When you have a toolkit, you are not obliged to use every tool for every job. Thus we might expect that not every grammatical mechanism provided by Universal Grammar appears in every language. For instance, some languages make heavy use of case marking, and others don't; some languages make heavy use of fixed word order, and others don't. We would like to say that Universal Grammar makes both these possibilities available to the child; but only the possibilities actually present in the environment come to realization in the child's developing grammar. (75)
At the same time, there is a constant re-evaluation of the inventory of elements posited in Universal Grammar. The goal is to posit the smallest toolkit that can still account for the data. (76)
In order for Universal Grammar to be an innate cognitive specialization, it must be transmitted genetically, just like anything else innate. (90)
But I think it fair to say that the manner in which this process is guided by genetics or anything else is pretty much a mystery at the moment—and this is only at the level of turning genetic instructions into neural architecture. (90)
Derek Bickerton (1981) documents in detail that children of a pidgin speaking community do not grow up speaking the pidgin, but rather use the pidgin as raw material for a grammatically much richer system called a “creole.” (99)
Creoles fromall over the world are often found to have grammatical devices not traceable to any of the parent languages of the pidgin. Thus, Bickerton's argument goes, Creole grammar must have come from the children's expectations of “what a language has to look like”—i.e. Universal Grammar—and they build these expectations into their linguistic output. The children's parents, on the other hand, do not learn the Creole; they continue to speak the pidgin, because they are past the critical period. (100)
Comment: Creoles from around the world often contain grammatical features that cannot be traced back to any of the parent languages of the original pidgin. This reveals a kind of subjectivity within Universal Grammar (UG), because it contradicts Chomsky’s deductive framework. If UG truly anticipates specific linguistic outputs, then it must follow certain principles to finely tune the development of creoles, making their features traceable. The fact that some features remain untraceable suggests that the formation of creoles involves a qualitative and quantitative leap, which strongly points to an element of subjectivity within UG. 世界各地的克里奧爾語往往包含一些在原始洋涇浜語的母語來源中無法追溯的語法特徵。這顯示出普遍語法（UG）中某種「主觀性」，因為這與喬姆斯基所提出的演繹性架構相矛盾。若普遍語法確實預期語言的產出，那麼它必須遵循某些原則來細緻地調整克里奧爾語的發展，使其特徵可以被追溯。然而，那些無法追溯的特徵卻意味著語言在形成過程中出現了質與量的躍升，這強烈表明普遍語法中存在某種主觀性。