without entirely determining it. We can think of the grammatical fragments in UG as“attractors”(in the dynamic
systems sense) that establish points of stability rather than absolute standards for grammatical patterns. That is, UG
renders certainparts ofthedesignspaceforwordsand 1-rulesmorestableand/or accessible,withgradientsofrelative
“markedness”as one moves away from the“core”cases. This leaves plenty of roo mfor linguistic idiosyncrasy at all
levels of generality, essentially in line with Culicover's proposal.
Here are a few of the most basic pieces one would want to include in this conception of UG:
That is, a phonologicalWord corresponds to a syntacticnoun, verb, adjective,or preposition—certainlythe prototype,
but one we have seen isonlya proto-type.
(44) NPi=[PHYSICAL OBJECT]i;VPj=[ACTION]jThat is, the prototypical NP denotes an object and the prototypical VP denotes an action. Lots of counterexamples to
this generalization can be cited (section 5.5), but again this seems to be the core from which all deviations proceed.^94
That is, the prototypical syllable is a consonantfollowedby a vowel.Languages deviatefro mthisprototypicalte mplate
in all sorts of ways, but this is clearly the benchmark from which all else springs. Many languages (e.g. Japanese)
essentially allowonlythis kind of syllable (plus syllables consisting of just a vowel), and there is no other syllable type
that enjoys such exclusivity.
That is, a phrasal syntactic category dominates a head of the corresponding lexical category (“X-bar theory”). This is
an essential and prototypical element of
192 ARCHITECTURAL FOUNDATIONS
(^94) It is significant, though, that the violations are asymmetrical, as observed in section 5.5. Lots of different semantic types can be expressed as nouns, but only events and
states of affairs can be expressed as verbs. Conversely, physicalobjectconcepts can be expressed onlyby nouns, but eventand state concepts can be expressed by nouns as
well as by verbs. A story about violable attractors cannot alone account for this asymmetry. See section 8.10 for more discussion.