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A consideration of the communicative abilities of other animals makes it clear not only that no other species has a system with the essential properties of a human natural language, but also that there is no reason to believe that such systems are even accessible to animals lacking our specific cognitive capacities (Anderson, 2004). In every animal species that has been seriously investigated, it is clear that the specific properties of its communicative mechanisms are tightly grounded in specific properties of its biology. There must be some aspect of our biological nature, therefore, which has been distinctively shaped in the course of evolution to subserve our ability to acquire and use the languages we do (Pinker & Bloom, 1990). Let us call this aspect of human biology the "Language Faculty," without prejudice as to whether components of it might have other roles to play as well.

Some have argued that it is plausible to suggest that there is very little about the Language Faculty that is unique to humans and to its role in language: perhaps only the capacity for recursive elaboration of structure (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002). This claim has provoked heated debate between those who maintain a highly structured species-specific capacity devoted to the acquisition and use of language (Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005; Jackendoff & Pinker, 2005) and those who argue that most of what makes language possible in humans has substantive parallels in other domains and/or other species (Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky, 2005; Samuels, 2009). I maintain that the participants in this discussion are largely talking past one another: while it is clear that analogs and even homologues of components of human biology relevant to language exist in other species, and in other cognitive domains, it is also clear that these components have been shaped distinctively in humans by their role in language.

Within Linguistics, there has similarly been argument over whether our ability to acquire and use language is the product of a distinctive faculty, or simply due to the confluence of capacities equally relevant to other domains. A component of that discussion has been controversy about whether the regularities we find across the whole range of human languages result from a distinctive and highly specific faculty, or are simply the inevitable outcome of external processes shaping language use and language change. This has made the process of discovering linguistic universals, and attributing them to the substantive character of the Language Faculty, particularly difficult: merely demonstrating that every language in the world conforms to a given generalization (even ignoring the problem of showing that this would also be true for all possible languages) does not support attributing that generalization to such a faculty if an alternative account in terms of external factors of usage and change is available.

Anderson (2008) suggests that this difficulty is more apparent than real. Supposing that external forces conspire to shape languages in particular ways, independent of the precise nature of the cognitive capacity underlying their acquisition and use, we should still expect that precisely these recurrent regularities would be incorporated into our biological nature by Baldwinian evolution, given the central role played by language in our ecological niche and the concomitant value of an ability to acquire the language of the surrounding community quickly and without excessive effort. Nativist and externalist accounts of linguistic regularities are therefore complementary, not contradictory. On this understanding, a highly specific Language Faculty is just what we predict if external forces of usage and change really can drive the emergence of recurrent cross-linguistic regularities.

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