It’s probably OK to deviate from the norm if you’re young, as long as you’re also white and middle class.

Noam Chomsky to the conclusion that everyone is born with a genetic blueprint containing information about the structure of language—a language instinct,

Augustine thought that words stood for things in the world: point to the thing, and you get the meaning of the word. This is a code-like view: there is a one-to-one correspondence between the symbol and the object or idea,

“to speak the same language” has become an idiom suggesting recognition, empathy and cooperation.)

This “usage-based” theory of language structure doesn’t require us to imagine a UG. It instead posits a universal set of constraints on language use: the need to be clear and expressive, but also efficient. And, as long as they don’t actually impede communication, certain structures will just endure, the baroque overdecoration characteristic of

In linguistics, the great imagined separation is that between langue and parole. It was articulated most clearly by the father of the modern academic discipline, Ferdinand de Saussure. He used langue to describe an abstract system, the set of rules and the lexicon which combine in the brains of speakers to give rise to parole, which is language as

Johann Herder, who said that to speak is to “swim in an inherited stream of images and words.”

UG must instead be some kind of repository for the rules governing the combination of words: that is, syntax.

The division between syntax, semantics and pragmatics was first suggested by the philosopher Charles Morris, who was concerned not just with linguistic signs but with signs in general, a field of study known as “semiotics.” He described pragmatics as being “the relation of signs to interpreters,” as opposed to semantics, which was “the relations of