Universal Grammar According to Some 12th Century Grammarians

As early as the 12th century the concept of universal grammar became a commonly discussed and accepted doctrine among the Latin grammarians. Universal grammar is discussed within the context of whether grammar (and the other Liberal Arts) could be diversified into species, i. e., the grammar of the individual languages. Some grammarians accepted the existence of ‘species grammaticae’ but only with the proviso that there were to be two kinds of grammarians: the teacher of grammar expounding the universal grammar and the person exercising his linguistic competence in the individual languages. Along with the interest in the ‘species grammaticae’ grew a continuous interest in crosslinguistc analysis by appeal to the vernacular on matters of pronunciation, semantics and syntax. By the end of the century more determined efforts were made to solve the questions of the identity of words in different languages. These attempts proved abortive with respect to the precise description of pronunciation, orthography and morphosyntactical features, whereas a more dialectically orientated analysis of requirements for sentence-constituents is handled successfully. Further, a good deal of the upsurge of cross-linguistic analysis is hampered by the stricter adherence to the formal features as found in the established theoretical framework of Latin grammar, to the detriment of linguistic description of the vernacular, to which no theoretical foundation is conceded.