linguistic structures - Professor Binkert's Webpage - Oakland ...

consonant sounds. The number and types of these features is not arbitrary. For example, all sounds
are either [+NASAL] or [–NASAL]; the air exits through the nose or the mouth.
Air could potentially escape the human head from the lungs via three routes: the mouth, the nose,
and the ears. In fact, when the tympanic membrane (eardrum) is not intact, people can blow smoke
through all these orifices. Despite this, no human language contains a phonological feature
opposition [+AURAL]/[–AURAL] meaning involving the ears/not involving the ears. The reason
for this is transparent: humans cannot use their ears for the production of sounds. There is no a
priori reason why the ear should have evolved in the way it did; conceivably, evolution could have
produced an aural canal with an unimpeded connection to the outside. This would have made it
possible to expel air through the ears normally; however, that did not occur. On the other hand, a
separation of the nasal and oral passages did occur in the evolution of mammals. From the point of
view of UG, human languages utilized this separation globally, so that most natural languages
contain a phonological feature opposition [+NASAL]/[–NASAL]. This feature opposition is
possible because humans have a velum which can be lowered to close off some of the oral passage
and allow nasal modification of the air stream. Thus, we have a clear example of how natural
languages are constrained by human anatomy.
Like formal universals, substantive universals are part of the genetic endowment. They form part
of the tacit linguistic competence that all humans innately possess, quite simply because they are the
direct reflection of man’s capacities and limitations. Children don’t have to learn that the sounds
of their native language won’t require modification through their ears, just as they don’t have to
learn that the rules of their native language are not based on counting. They are born with the
intuitive knowledge that [+AURAL] and [–AURAL] are not possible phonological features of
human languages, just as they are born with intuitive knowledge of principle (34). Further, since
all normal children can breathe either through their nose or their mouth, children intuitively know
that their native language might contain the features [+NASAL] and [–NASAL].
Notice however that every language does not have to contain the same set of universals. Not every
language has the same rules and the same features. For example, English does not use the feature
opposition [±NASAL] to distinguish its vowels, but French does. UG simply defines the limits of
what can be part of a human language because of the capacities and limitations of the human
language apparatus (the brain and the organs of speech and hearing). Therefore, a native speaker’s
tacit linguistic competence consists of two kinds of knowledge: (i) innate knowledge or UG, which
is part of a human being’s genetic endowment and consists of the kinds of rules and features which
any language might contain; and (ii) acquired knowledge, which consists of the particular rules and
features that occur in the native language(s) to which the speaker has been exposed as a child.
In the specification of UG, the close association between grammatical characterization and
grammatical realization becomes clear. Formal and substantive universals, which appear as the rules
and features in the grammars of human languages, are grounded in the linguistic capacities of
humans. Therefore, the discovery of a universal in the course of grammatical characterization can
often lead to a hypothesis about the way humans process information. An example of this is the
postulated formal universal (36a) which, it might be argued, leads to the perceptual strategy (36b).
35