The Components of Language: What’s Specific to Language, and What’s Specific to Humans1

In the context of contemporary mentalist study of language, one way of couching the question of language universals is in terms of language acquisition: What components are universally available in the brains of language learners that make possible the relatively rapid acquisition of language? The present chapter addresses this question—the character of the human language capacity. We should be clear, however, that the answer to this question may not yield characteristics common to all human languages—a more traditional interpretation of “language universals”— in that some components of the universal brain capacity may not be universally deployed. Here we are more concerned with the question of what kind of biological system language is, and how it relates to other systems in our own species and others. This question embraces a number of more specific ones. The first is which aspects of the faculty are learned from environmental input and which aspects arise from the design of the brain (including the ability to learn the learned parts)—the language capacity in our sense. To take a clear example, the fact that a canine pet is called dog in English but chien in French is learned, but the fact that words can be learned at all hinges on the predisposition of children to interpret the noises made by others as meaningful signals. A second question is what parts of a person’s language ability (learned or builtin) are specific to language and what parts belong to more general abilities. Words, for example, are specifically a part of language, but the use of the lungs and the vocal cords, although necessary for spoken language, are not limited to language. The answers to this question will often not be dichotomous. The vocal tract, for example,