Los universales del lenguaje: el ciclo transformatorio y la «rule of tree-pruning»

Abstract

The object of this article is to explain, that Transformational Grammars take Linguistic Universals as Grammar Universals. From the point of view of this hypothesis, a discourse identification with its object is implied, and it shows one of the common characteristics of the empirical conception of knowledge, which operates by means of extraction, abstraction and practice techniques, in order to make a distinction between formal and substantive universals. The transformational cycle as a project is devised according to this empirical conception and, consequently, the transformational order does not occur in the reality of language. The Rule of Tree-Pruning bears no connection with reality, since the meta-rule that eliminates those sentences which have not undergone pruning is a mere artefact of Grammar, and not a reflection of the actual organization of language in the human brain. Finally, the Universalist Unitarian Hyphotesis considers as a priori forms both formal and substantive universals, the first being syntactic and the second semantic, the two of them coming from the same source: the Idea. But such forms are not available in language.