Universal grammar is, and has been for some time, a completely empty concept. Ask yourself: what exactly is in universal grammar? Oh, you don't know – but you are sure that the experts (generative linguists) do. Wrong; they don't. And not only that, they have no method for finding out. If there is a method, it would be looking carefully at all the world's thousands of languages to discern universals. But that is what linguistic typologists have been doing for the past several decades, and, as Evans & Levinson (E&L) report, they find no universal grammar.

I am told that a number of supporters of universal grammar will be writing commentaries on this article. Though I have not seen them, here is what is certain. You will not be seeing arguments of the following type: I have systematically looked at a well-chosen sample of the world's languages, and I have discerned the following universals … And you will not even be seeing specific hypotheses about what we might find in universal grammar if we followed such a procedure. What you will be seeing are in-principle arguments about why there have to be constraints, how there is a poverty of the stimulus, and other arguments that are basically continuations of Chomsky's original attack on behaviorism; to wit, that the mind is not a blank slate and language learning is not rat-like conditioning. Granted, behaviorism cannot account for language. But modern cognitive scientists do not assume that the mind is a blank slate, and they work with much more powerful, cognitively based forms of learning such as categorization, analogy, statistical learning, and intention-reading. The in-principle arguments against the sufficiency of “learning” to account for language acquisition (without a universal grammar) assume a long-gone theoretical adversary.

Given all of the data that E&L cite, how could anyone maintain the notion of a universal grammar with linguistic content? Traditionally, there have been three basic strategies. First, just as we may force English grammar into the Procrustean bed of Latin grammar – that is how I was taught the structure of English in grade school – the grammars of the world's so-called exotic languages may be forced into an abstract scheme based mainly on European languages. For example, one can say that all the world's languages have “subject.” But actually there are about 30 different grammatical features that have been used with this concept, and any one language has only a subset – often with almost non-overlapping subsets between languages. Or take noun phrase. Yes, all languages may be used to make reference to things in the world. But some languages have a large repertoire of specially dedicated words (nouns) that play the central role in this function, whereas others do not: they mostly have a stock of all-purpose words which can be used for this, as well as other, functions. So are subjects and noun phrases universal? As you please.

Second, from the beginning a central role in universal grammar has been played by the notion of transformations, or “movement.” A paradigm phenomenon in English and many European languages is so-called wh- movement, in which the wh- word in questions always comes at the beginning no matter which element is being questioned. Thus, we ask, “What did John eat?”, which “moves” the thing eaten to the beginning of the sentence (from the end of the sentence in the statement “John ate X”). But in many of the world's languages, questions are formed by substituting the wh- word for the element being questioned in situ, with no “movement” at all, as in “John ate what?”. In classic generative grammar analyses, it is posited that all languages have wh- movement, it is just that one cannot always see it on the surface – there is underlying movement. But the evidence for this is, to say the least, indirect.

The third, more recent, strategy has been to say that not all languages must have all features of universal grammar. Thus, E&L note that some languages do not seem to have any recursive structures, and recursion has also been posited as a central aspect of universal grammar (in a very different way than such notions as noun phrase). The response has been that, first of all, these languages do have recursive structures, it is just that one cannot see them on the surface. But even if they do not have such structures, that is fine because the components of universal grammar do not all apply universally. This strategy is the most effective because it basically immunizes the Universal Grammar (UG) hypothesis from falsification.

For sure, all of the world's languages have things in common, and E&L document a number of them. But these commonalities come not from any universal grammar, but rather from universal aspects of human cognition, social interaction, and information processing – most of which were in existence in humans before anything like modern languages arose. Thus, in one account (Tomasello Reference Tomasello2003a; Reference Tomasello2008), human linguistic universals derive from the fact that all humans everywhere: (1) conceive nonlinguistically of agents of actions, patients of actions, possessors, locations, and so forth; (2) read the intentions of others, including communicative intentions; (3) follow into, direct, and share attention with others; (4) imitatively learn things from others, using categorization, analogy, and statistical learning to extract hierarchically structured patterns of language use; and (5) process vocal-auditory information in specific ways. The evolution of human capacities for linguistic communication draw on what was already there cognitively and socially ahead of time, and this is what provides the many and varied “constraints” on human languages; that is, this is what constrains the way speech communities grammaticalize linguistic constructions historically (what E&L call “stable engineering solutions satisfying multiple design constraints”; target article, Abstract, para. 2).

Why don't we just call this universal grammar? The reason is because historically, universal grammar referred to specific linguistic content, not general cognitive principles, and so it would be a misuse of the term. It is not the idea of universals of language that is dead, but rather, it is the idea that there is a biological adaptation with specific linguistic content that is dead.