Erkki Luuk: A type-theoretical approach to Universal Grammar

The idea of Universal Grammar as the hypothetical linguistic structure shared by all human languages harkens back at least to the 13th century. The best known modern elaborations of the idea are due to Chomsky (e.g. 1970, 1981, 1995). Following a devastating critique from theoretical (e.g. Jackendoff 2002), typological (e.g. Evans & Levinson 2009) and field (e.g. Everett 2005) linguistics, these elaborations, the idea of Universal Grammar itself and the more general idea of language universals stand untenable and are largely abandoned. The talk will show how to tackle the hypothetical structure of Universal Grammar using dependent type theory in a framework very different from the Chomskyan ones.