That, at least, is the hope. But a comparative study of linguistic traits published online today supplies a reality check. Russell Gray at the University of Auckland and his colleagues consider the evolution of grammars in the light of two previous attempts to find universality in language.

The most famous of these efforts was initiated by Noam Chomsky, who suggested that humans are born with an innate language-acquisition capacity that dictates a universal grammar. A few generative rules are then sufficient to unfold the entire fundamental structure of a language, which is why children can learn it so quickly.

(49)The second, by Joshua Greenberg, takes a more empirical approach to universality identifying traits (particularly in word order) shared by many language which are considered to represent biases that result from cognitive constraints

Gray and his colleagues have put them to the test by examining four family trees that between them represent more than 2,000 languages.(50)Chomsky’s grammar should show patterns of language change that are independent of the family tree or the pathway tracked through it. Whereas Greenbergian universality predicts strong co-dependencies between particular types of word-order relations. Neither of these patterns is borne out by the analysis, suggesting that the structures of the languages are lire age-specific and not governed by universals

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