Universal Grammar or Common Syntax? A Critical Study of Jackendoff's Patterns in the Mind

“Why are we the way we are?” That huge question, simply expressed, opens this book. To begin to explain the way we are, in the first chapter (“Finding Our Way into the Problem: The Nature/Nurture Issue”), Jackendoff advances and defends Chomsky’s two “Fundamental Arguments” as “pathbreaking” “parameters”: “Mental Grammar” and “Innate Knowledge” (p. 6). The first demands a set of unconscious principles, while the second demands a “genetically determined specialization for language” (p. 6). In addition, Jackendoff proffers his own “Fundamental Argument”: “The Construction of Experience” (p. 7). We experience the world, he says, by means of these “unconscious principles that operate in the brain” (p. 7). And yet that summary does not reveal the author’s most ambitious argument. Through the course of the book, one reads that a universal or mental grammar is not limited to linguistics. A universal innate grammar is justified by, because it explains, other versions of mental grammar, such as those for American Sign Language, music, vision, and concepts at large. What kind of universal grammar is it that governs these patterns in the mind? In extrapolating from Chomsky’s argument to other kinds of mental patterns, could Jackendoff have diluted the logic of Chomsky’s thesis about language acquisition? What is the logic for universal grammar if it serves to unify grammars for hand languages, music, vision, and concepts? In Chapter 2 (“The Argument for Mental Grammar”), Jackendoff writes for his general audience without qualification: “The notion of mental grammar stored in the brain of a language user is the central concept of modern linguistics” (p. 15). What is it that is stored? The clear answer is pattern. He says that linguists not only think of the rules for patterning words “but also the patterns of sentences possible in our language. These patterns, in turn, describe not just patterns of words but also patterns of patterns” (p. 14), which are the rules of language that make up “mental grammar”. He opens his discussion of communication with light and sound patterns, diagramming the profiles of two talking heads. In the diagram, “a pattern of light reflected off a tree strikes the eyes” of Harry. Harry might wish to say something about the tree to Sam: “Then Harry’s nervous system causes his