Human beings come to know a vast amount of specific and general information about the language(s) that they speak. Instead of assuming that we must bring to the task knowledge that is specific to Language in order for us to accomplish this task, our research explores the idea that it may well be possible to learn language by using our general cognitive processes. A key observation facilitates an explanation: our knowledge of language consists of form-function correspondences (constructions).
It is striking how different human languages can be, given that we all need to express the same basic types of messages. Yet there remain certain cross-linguistic generalizations that require explanation. Another aspect of our research aims to explain these generalizations.