Natural language and universal grammar is the first of two volumes with the common subtitle Essays in linguistic theory (henceforth Essays). Volume II, entitled Semantics, subjectivity and localism, will be published shortly.

The title that I have given to Essays I is not as innocent as it might appear to be at first sight; and there are those of my colleagues who might see it as being almost wilfully provocative. One of my general aims, in bringing the various chapters of Essays together, is to demonstrate that the expressions ‘natural language’ and ‘universal grammar’ are often employed nowadays loosely and uncritically (if not equivocally) in the case of the former and tendentiously in the case of the latter. What is (or, in my view, ought to be) meant by linguists when they use the highly ambiguous phrase ‘natural language’ (either generically or non-generically) is a question that is directly addressed in Chapter 4 of Essays I. All the chapters in both volumes are concerned with the structure of what are normally, but imprecisely, referred to as natural languages. Almost all of them, also, are concerned with (so-called) natural languages within the framework of what would be referred to traditionally as universal grammar. But, as I explain in Chapter 7 of Essays I (and, in greater detail, in one or two of the chapters in Essays II), my view of universal grammar differs from the generativist or Chomskyan view, which currently holds sway in linguistic theory and is propagated (all too often uncritically) in many textbooks.