Chomsky, N., 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Foris, Dordrecht. Chomsky made it a goal of the Government and Binding framework to accommodate languages such as Japanese and Warlpiri that apparently did not conform to his proposed language universal of Move α.
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He was > able in his wisdom or – please pardon this manner of speaking – in pursuing > a divine fantasy … to put any particular muscles into action, one alone or > several muscles together, when He wished the characteristic signs of the > emotions, even the most fleeting, to be written briefly on man's face. Once > this language of facial expression was created, it sufficed for Him to give > all human beings the instinctive faculty of always expressing their > sentiments by contracting the same muscles. This rendered the language > universal and immutable.Duchenne, Mecanisme, part I, 31; Cuthbertson trans.
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In Meno, Socrates unearths knowledge of geometry concepts from a servant who was never explicitly taught them. Plato's Problem directly parallels the idea of the innateness of language, universal grammar, and more specifically the poverty of the stimulus argument because it reveals that people's knowledge is richer than what they are exposed to. Chomsky illustrates that humans are not exposed to all structures of their language, yet they fully achieve knowledge of these structures. Linguistic nativism is the theory that humans are born with some knowledge of language.
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About the same time a Walloon Movement emerged, led by Jules Destrée (1863–1936) and based on loyalty to the French language. Universal suffrage meant the Francophones were a political minority, so the Walloon Movement concentrated on protecting French where it had a majority, and did not contest the expanded use of Dutch in Flemish areas.Kas Deprez and Louis Vos, eds. Nationalism in Belgium: Shifting Identities, 1780–1995 (1998), pp 10–11, 139–52 The Flemish goal of linguistic equality (especially in schools and courts) was finally achieved by a series of laws in the 1920s and 1930s.
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Believing that he was investigating a God-given language of facial signs, Duchenne writes: > In the face our creator was not concerned with mechanical necessity. He was > able in his wisdom or – please pardon this manner of speaking – in pursuing > a divine fantasy … to put any particular muscles into action, one alone or > several muscles together, when He wished the characteristic signs of the > emotions, even the most fleeting, to be written briefly on man's face. Once > this language of facial expression was created, it sufficed for Him to give > all human beings the instinctive faculty of always expressing their > sentiments by contracting the same muscles. This rendered the language > universal and immutable Duchenne, Mecanisme, part I, 31; Cuthbertson trans., > 19.
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He claimed that this Law of Abbreviation is a universal structural property of language, hypothesizing that it arises as a result of individuals optimising form-meaning mappings under competing pressures to communicate accurately but also efficiently. Zipf GK. 1935 The Psychobiology of language, an introduction to dynamic philology. Boston, MA: Houghton–Mifflin Zipf GK. 1949 Human behavior and the principle of least effort. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Since then, the research on this linguistic law has continued and it has been empirically verified for almost a thousand languages of 80 different linguistic families when studying the relationship between the size of words measuring them in terms of number of characters in texts and their frequencies. Bentz C, Ferrer-i-Cancho R. 2016 Zipf’s Law of abbreviation as a language universal.
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