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Universal grammar (UG) in modern linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that a certain set of structural rules are innate to humans, independent of sensory experience. With more linguistic stimuli received in the course of psychological development, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG.^[1] It is sometimes known as "mental grammar", and stands contrasted with other "grammars", e.g. prescriptive, descriptive and pedagogical.^[2]^[3] The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare.^[4] It is a matter of empirical investigation to determine precisely what properties are universal and what linguistic capacities are innate. Pre-Chomskyan ideas of universal grammar are described in History.

Argument

The theory of universal grammar proposes that if human beings are brought up under normal conditions (not those of extreme sensory deprivation), then they will always develop language with certain properties (e.g., distinguishing nouns from verbs, or distinguishing function words from content words). The theory proposes that there is an innate, genetically determined language faculty that knows these rules, making it easier and faster for children to learn to speak than it otherwise would be.^[5] This faculty does not know the vocabulary of any particular language (so words and their meanings must be learned), and there remain several parameters which can vary freely among languages (such as whether adjectives come before or after nouns) which must also be learned.

As Chomsky puts it, "Evidently, development of language in the individual must involve three factors: genetic endowment, which sets limits on the attainable languages, thereby making language acquisition possible; external data, converted to the experience that selects one or another language within a narrow range; principles not specific to the Faculty of Language."^[6]

Occasionally, aspects of universal grammar seem describable in terms of general details regarding cognition. For example, if a predisposition to categorize events and objects as different classes of things is part of human cognition, and directly results in nouns and verbs showing up in all languages, then it could be assumed that rather than this aspect of universal grammar being specific to language, it is more generally a part of human cognition. To distinguish properties of languages that can be traced to other facts regarding cognition from properties of languages that cannot, the abbreviation UG* can be used. UG is the term often used by Chomsky for those aspects of the human brain which cause language to be the way that it is (i.e. are universal grammar in the sense used here) but here for discussion, it is used for those aspects which are furthermore specific to language (thus UG, as Chomsky uses it, is just an abbreviation for universal grammar, but UG* as used here is a subset of universal grammar).

In the same article, Chomsky casts the theme of a larger research program in terms of the following question: "How little can be attributed to UG while still accounting for the variety of 'I-languages' attained, relying on third factor principles?"^[6] (I-languages meaning internal languages, the brain states that correspond to knowing how to speak and understand a particular language, and third factor principles meaning (3) in the previous quote).

Chomsky has speculated that UG might be extremely simple and abstract, for example only a mechanism for combining symbols in a particular way, which he calls "merge". The following quote shows that Chomsky does not use the term "UG" in the narrow sense UG* suggested above:

"The conclusion that merge falls within UG holds whether such recursive generation is unique to FL (faculty of language) or is appropriated from other systems."^[6]

In other words, merge is seen as part of UG because it causes language to be the way it is, universal, and is not part of the environment or general properties independent of genetics and environment. Merge is part of universal grammar whether it is specific to language, or whether, as Chomsky suggests, it is also used for an example in mathematical thinking.

The distinction is important because there is a long history of argument about UG*, whereas some people working on language agree that there is universal grammar. Many people assume that Chomsky means UG* when he writes UG (and in some cases he might actually mean UG* [though not in the passage quoted above]).

Some students of universal grammar study a variety of grammars to extract generalizations called linguistic universals, often in the form of "If X holds true, then Y occurs." These have been extended to a variety of traits, such as the phonemes found in languages, the word orders which languages choose, and the reasons why children exhibit certain linguistic behaviors.

Later linguists who have influenced this theory include Chomsky and Richard Montague, developing their version of this theory as they considered issues of the argument from poverty of the stimulus to arise from the constructivist approach to linguistic theory. The application of the idea of universal grammar to the study of second language acquisition (SLA) is represented mainly in the work of McGill linguist Lydia White.

Syntacticians generally hold that there are parametric points of variation between languages, although heated debate occurs over whether UG constraints are essentially universal due to being "hard-wired" (Chomsky's principles and parameters approach), a logical consequence of a specific syntactic architecture (the generalized phrase structure approach) or the result of functional constraints on communication (the functionalist approach).^[7]

Restructure

History

The term "universal grammar" predates Noam Chomsky, but it is important to understand that pre-Chomskyan ideas of universal grammar are different. For Chomsky UG is "[the] theory of the genetically based language faculty"^[8], which makes UG a theory of language acquisition, and part of the innateness hypothesis. Earlier grammarians and philosophers thought about universal grammar in the sense of a universally shared property or grammar of all languages. The closest analog to their understanding of universal grammar in the late 20th century are Greenberg's linguistic universals.

The idea of a universal grammar can be traced back to Roger Bacon's observations in his c. 1245 Overview of Grammar and c. 1268 Greek Grammar that all languages are built upon a common grammar, even though it may undergo incidental variations; and the 13th century speculative grammarians who, following Bacon, postulated universal rules underlying all grammars. The concept of a universal grammar or language was at the core of the 17th century projects for philosophical languages. An influential work in that time was the Grammaire générale by Claude Lancelot and Antoine Arnauld, who built on the works of René Descartes. They tried to describe a general grammar for languages, coming to the conclusion that grammar has to be universal.^[9] There is a Scottish school of universal grammarians from the 18th century, as distinguished from the philosophical language project, which included authors such as James Beattie, Hugh Blair, James Burnett, James Harris, and Adam Smith. The article on grammar in the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1771) contains an extensive section titled "Of Universal Grammar".

This tradition was continued in the late 19th century by Wilhelm Wundt and in the early 20th century by linguist Otto Jespersen. Jespersen disagreed with early grammarians on their formulation of "universal grammar", arguing that they tried to derive too much from Latin, and that a UG based on Latin was bound to fail considering the breadth of worldwide linguistic variation.^[10] He does not fully dispense with the idea of a "universal grammar", but reduces it to universal syntactic categories or super-categories, such as number, tenses etc. ^[11] Jespersen does not discuss whether these properties come from facts about general human cognition or from a language specific endowment (which would be closer to the Chomskian formulation). As this work predates molecular genetics, he does not discuss the notion of a genetically conditioned universal grammar.

During the rise of behaviorism, the idea of a universal grammar (in either sense) was discarded. It reemerged to prominence and influence, in modern linguistics with the theories of Chomsky and Montague in the 1950s–1970s, as part of the "linguistics wars".

Chomsky's UG

The theory of the genetically based language faculty is called Universal Grammar (the galilean challenge)^[8]

UG in General

Early Modern Philosophers

Grammaire générale et raisonnée

Jespersen

The early 20th century linguist Otto Jespersen disagreed with early grammarians on their formulation of "universal grammar", arguing that they tried to derive too much from Latin, and that a UG based on Latin was bound to fail considering the breadth of worldwide linguistic variation.^[10] He does not fully dispense with the idea of a "universal grammar", but reduces it to universal syntactic categories or super-categories, such as number, tenses etc. ^[11] Jespersen does not discuss whether these properties come from facts about general human cognition or from a language specific endowment (which would be closer to the Chomskian formulation). As this work predates molecular genetics, he does not discuss the notion of a genetically conditioned universal grammar.

Evidence in favor of this idea can be found in studies like Valian (1986), which show that children of surprisingly young ages understand syntactic categories and their distribution before this knowledge shows up in production.^[12]

[1]
Noam Chomsky. "Tool Module: Chomsky's Universal Grammar". Retrieved 2010-10-07.
[2]
Thornbury, Scott (2006). An A-Z of ELT. Macmillan Education. p. 92. ISBN 978-1-4050-7063-8.
[3]
Szendroi, Kriszta (16 December 2014). "First Words: How do children develop language?". Word of Mouth. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 24 December 2014.
[4]
Evans, Nicholas; Levinson, Stephen C. (26 October 2009). "The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science". Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 32 (5): 429–48. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999094X. PMID 19857320. S2CID 145795433. Archived (PDF) from the original on 27 July 2018.
[5]
"Tool Module: Chomsky's Universal Grammar". thebrain.mcgill.ca. Retrieved 2017-08-28.
[6]
Chomsky, Noam (2007). "Approaching UG from Below". In Hans-Martin Gärtner; Uli Sauerland (eds.). Interfaces + Recursion = Language? Chomsky's Minimalism and the View from Syntax-Semantics. Studies in Generative Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-018872-1.
[7]
Mark C. Baker (2003). "Syntax". In Mark Aronoff; Janie Rees-Miller (eds.). The Handbook of Linguistics. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-0252-0.
[8]
Chomsky 2017, p. 3.
[9]
Lancelot, Claude, 1615?-1695. (1967). Grammaire generale et raisonnee, 1660. Scolar Press. OCLC 367432981.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
[10]
Jespersen 1965, p. 46-49.
[11]
Jespersen 1965, p. 53.
[12]
Valian 1986.

Chomsky, Noam (2007), "Approaching UG from Below", Interfaces + Recursion = Language?, DE GRUYTER, pp. 1–30, doi:10.1515/9783110207552-001, ISBN 9783110207552{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)

Chomsky, Noam (2017), "The Galilean Challenge: Architecture and Evolution of Language", Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 880: 012015, doi:10.1088/1742-6596/880/1/012015, ISSN 1742-6588{{citation}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link)
Jespersen, Otto (1965) [1924], The Philosophy of Grammar, Norton
Lancelot, Claude; Arnauld, Antoine (1968) [1660], Grammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l'art de parler, expliqués d'une manière claire et naturelle, Slatkine Reprints
Valian, Virgina (1986), "Syntactic Categories in the Speech of Young Children", Developmental Psychology, 22 (4): 562–579, doi:10.1037/0012-1649.22.4.562

Chomsky's UG

UG in General

Early Modern Philosophers

Jespersen

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