Alsointherepertoireofruletypesbelong particular constraintsonderivationsthathavebeenproposed over theyears.
For instance, section 3.2.3 mentioned the Sentential Subject Constraint, which prohibits certain kinds of relation
between underlying and surfaceforms. Insofar as every movementrule (or its equivalent in alternative non-movement
theories) in every language obeys this constraint—and children don't violate it in the course of learning language—we
would like to be able to say that this constraint and others like it come prespecified in the child's toolkit.
As weobservedinChapter3),a greatdealoftheoreticaldisputeconcernswhichkinds ofphenomenonfitunderwhich
kind of rule—and whether certainsorts of rules (inparticular derivational rules and inheritancehierarchies) exist at all.
These disputes concern specifically what repertoire of rule types should be ascribed to the child's prespecification.
Still more basically, the child needs to f-know in what overall linguistic structures the basic building blocks can be
arranged. The basic architectural outline of linguistic structure sketched in Fig. 1.1—interconnected phonological,
syntactic, and conceptual/semantic structures, each containingsubstructures and tiers of particular sorts—iscommon
to all languages; this sort of formal universal might be called an“architectural universal.” Languages can differ
considerably in how this architecture is realized, but at the largest scale there is little or no deviation.
Some of the major changes in linguistictheory haveconcerned architectural universals. For instance, the levelof Deep
Structure proposed inAspectsis meant as an architectural universal: it is a syntactic level that is input to both the
transformational component and semantic interpretation. The proposed architecture changed when the role of Deep
Structure in semantics was altered in subsequent versions of the theory. Chapter 5) will develop a more extensive
revision of the overall architecture.
4.5 The balance of linguistic and more general capacities
Michael Tomasello (1995) voices a common complaint with linguists' hypotheses about formal universals, in the
context of a critique of Steven Pinker's (1994b) exposition of Universal Grammar.
[T]he list [of innate aspects of language] contains things that no nonlinguist would ever recognize—such things as
the projection principle, the empty category principle, the subjacency constraint, and the coordinate structure
constraint.... [A]ll of these universals are described in linguistically specific terms such that it is very difficult to
relate them to cognition in other psychological domains. (Tomasello 1995: 13 5–6)However, Tomasello begs the question: he presupposes that everything innate in language should be explicable in
terms of more general psychological phenomena.