Language universals and linguistic knowledge

One major difference between the typological approach to language universals and the approach taken within generative grammar and its offspring concerns the status of language universals in terms of a speaker's linguistic knowledge, that is, whether or not language universals are part of grammatical representation in a speaker's mind. The paper offers a number of arguments supporting the view that typological universals as such should not be regarded as part of a speaker's linguistic knowledge. The paper also argues that there is no evidence that a speaker's linguistic knowledge consists of an inventory of universal grammatical categories and relations that can be defined in formal terms. Contrary to what is assumed by generative linguists and many typologically oriented linguists, we only have distributional evidence for language-specific and construction-specific grammatical categories and relations, and universals of grammar are rather found in a number of principles of correspondence between language form and language function manifested in these categories and relations