grammar (noun): the structure and system of a language, or of languages

in general, usually considered to consist of syntax and morphology

Grammar is the system of a language. People sometimes describe grammar

as the "rules" of a language; but in fact no language has rules*. If we use the
word "rules", we suggest that somebody created the rules first and then spoke
the language, like a new game. But languages did not start like that.
Languages started by people making sounds which evolved into words,
phrases and sentences. No commonly-spoken language is fixed. All
languages change over time. What we call "grammar" is simply a reflection of
a language at a particular time.

Do we need to study grammar to learn a language? The short answer is "no".

Very many people in the world speak their own, native language without
having studied its grammar. Children start to speak before they even know the
word "grammar". But if you are serious about learning a foreign language, the
long answer is "yes, grammar can help you to learn a language more quickly
and more efficiently." It's important to think of grammar as something that can
help you, like a friend. When you understand the grammar (or system) of a
language, you can understand many things yourself, without having to ask a
teacher or look in a book.

So think of grammar as something good, something positive, something that

you can use to find your way - like a signpost or a map.

*Except invented languages like Esperanto. And if Esperanto were widely

spoken, its rules would soon be very different.

KINDS OF GRAMMAR

1 DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR:

The term descriptive grammar refers to an objective, nonjudgmental

description of the grammatical constructions in a language. It's an examination of
how a language is actually being used, in writing and in speech. Specialists in
descriptive grammar (linguists) examine the principles and patterns that underlie
the use of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences.

Kirk Hazen notes, "Descriptive grammars do not give advice: They detail
the ways in which native speakers use their language. A descriptive grammar is a
survey of a language. For any living language, a descriptive grammar from one
century will differ from a descriptive grammar of the next century because the
language will have changed." ("An Introduction to Language." John Wiley, 2015)

"Descriptive grammar," Edwin L. Battistella notes in "Bad Language," "is

the basis for dictionaries, which record changes in vocabulary and usage, and for
the field of linguistics, which aims at describing languages and investigating the
nature of language."

The term descriptive is a little bit misleading, as descriptive grammar does

provide analysis and explanation of the language's grammar and not just
description of it.

2PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR:

The term prescriptive grammar refers to a set of norms or rules governing

how a language should or should not be used rather than describing the ways in
which a language is actually used. Contrast with descriptive grammar. Also
called normative grammar and prescriptivism.

A person who dictates how people should write or speak is called

a prescriptivist or a prescriptive grammarian.

According to linguists Ilse Depraetere and Chad Langford, "A prescriptive

grammar is one that gives hard and fast rules about what is right (or
grammatical) and what is wrong (or ungrammatical), often with advice about
what not to say but with little explanation" (Advanced English Grammar: A
Linguistic Approach, 2012).

Observations:
 "There has always been a tension between the descriptive and prescriptive
functions of grammar. Currently, descriptive grammar is dominant among
theorists, but prescriptive grammar is taught in the schools and
exercises a range of social effects."
(Ann Bodine, "Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar." The Feminist
Critique of Language, ed. D. Cameron. Routledge, 1998)
 "Prescriptive grammarians are judgmental and attempt
to change linguistic behavior of a particular sort and in a particular
direction. Linguists--or mental grammarians, on the other hand, seek
to explain the knowledge of language that guides people's everyday use of
language regardless of their schooling."
 (Maya Honda and Wayne O'Neil, Thinking Linguistically. Blackwell,
2008)
 The Difference Between Descriptive Grammar and Prescriptive
Grammar:
"The difference between descriptive grammar and prescriptive
grammar is comparable to the difference between constitutive rules,
which determine how something works (such as the rules for the game of
chess), and regulatory rules, which control behavior (such as the rules of
etiquette). If the former are violated, the thing cannot work, but if the latter
are violated, the thing works, but crudely, awkwardly, or rudely."
(Laurel J. Brinton and Donna Brinton, The Linguistic Structure of Modern
English. John Benjamins, 2010)

 The Rise of Prescriptive Grammar in the 18th Century:

"To many people in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the
language was indeed seriously unwell. It was suffering from a raging
disease of uncontrolled usage. . . .
"There was an urgency surrounding the notion of a standard language, in
the eighteenth century. People needed to know who they were talking to.
Snap judgments were everything, when it came to social position. And
things are not much different today. We make immediate judgments based
on how people dress, how they do their hair, decorate their bodies--and
how they speak and write. It is the first bit of discourse that counts.
"The prescriptive grammarians went out of their way to invent as
many rules as possible which might distinguish polite from impolite
speech. They didn't find very many--just a few dozen, a tiny number
compared with all the thousands of rules of grammar that operate in
English. But these rules were propounded with maximum authority and
severity, and given plausibility by the claim that they were going to help
people to be clear and precise. As a result, generations of schoolchildren
would be taught them, and confused by them."
(David Crystal, The Fight for English. Oxford University Press, 2006)

Contrast Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar

Contrast the type with prescriptive grammar, which notes how something should
or should not be used, what is right and wrong. Prescriptive grammarians (such
as most editors and teachers) attempt to enforce rules concerning “correct” or
“incorrect” usage.

According to Donald G. Ellis, "All languages adhere to syntactical rules of one

sort or another, but the rigidity of these rules is greater in some languages. It is
very important to distinguish between the syntactical rules that govern a
language and the rules that a culture imposes on its language. This is the
distinction between descriptive grammar and prescriptive grammar. Descriptive
grammars are essentially scientific theories that attempt to explain how language
works....People spoke long before there were linguists around to uncover the
rules of speaking....Prescriptive grammars, on the other hand, are the stuff of
high school English teachers. They 'prescribe,' like medicine for what ails you,
how you 'ought' to speak." ("From Language to Communication." Lawrence
Erlbaum, 1999)

Examples of the Difference

To illustrate the difference between the types, for a descriptive grammarian, the
sentence "I ain't going," is grammatical, because it's spoken by someone using the
language to construct a sentence that has meaning for someone else who speaks
the same language. However, to a prescriptive grammarian, it most certainly isn't
a grammatical sentence, because, as the adage says, "ain't a word..." (Though it is
in the dictionary). And just having the word ain't in the dictionary exactly
illustrates the difference between the two types—descriptive grammar notes its
use in the language, pronunciation, meaning, and maybe even etymology,
without judgment. It's prescriptive grammar that says that the
term ain't shouldn't be used, especially in formal speaking or writing.

For a descriptive grammarian to say that something is ungrammatical, the

sentence would need to be something that a native speaker just wouldn't put
together. For example, someone speaking English wouldn't put two question
words at the beginning of a single sentence. The result would be unintelligible as
well as ungrammatical. In that case, the descriptive and prescriptive
grammarians would agree.

3 COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR:
Comparative grammar is the branch of linguistics primarily concerned with the
analysis and comparison of the grammatical structures of related languages or
dialects.

The term comparative grammar was commonly used by 19th-

century philologists. However, Ferdinand de Saussure regarded comparative
grammar as "a misnomer for several reasons, the most troublesome of which is
that it implies the existence of a scientific grammar other than that which draws
on the comparison of languages" (Course in General Linguistics, 1916).

In the modern era, notes Sanjay Jain et al., "the branch of linguistics known as
'comparative grammar' is the attempt to characterize the class of (biologically
possible) natural languages through formal specification of their grammars; and
a theory of comparative grammar is such a specification of some definite
collection. Contemporary theories of comparative grammar begin with Chomsky .
. . , but there are several different proposals currently under investigation"
(Systems That Learn: An Introduction to Learning Theory, 1999).

Also Known As: comparative philology

Observations
 "If we would understand the origin and real nature of grammatical forms,
and of the relations which they represent, we must compare them with
similar forms in kindred dialects and languages . . ..
"[The task of the comparative grammarian] is to compare the
grammatical forms and usages of an allied group of tongues and thereby
reduce them to their earliest forms and senses."
("Grammar," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911)
 Comparative Grammar--Past and Present
"Contemporary work in comparative grammar, like the comparative
work carried out by nineteenth-century grammarians, is concerned with
establishing [an] explanatory basis for the relationships between
languages. The work of the nineteenth century focused on relationships
between languages and groups of languages primarily in terms of a
common ancestry. It assumed a view of linguistic change as by and large
systematic and lawful (rule governed) and, on the basis of this assumption,
attempted to explain the relationship between languages in terms of a
common ancestor (often a hypothetical one for which there was no actual
evidence in the historical record). Contemporary comparative grammar, in
contrast, is significantly broader in scope. It is concerned with a theory of
grammar that is postulated to be an innate component of the human
mind/brain, a faculty of language that provides an explanatory basis for
how a human being can acquire a first language (in fact, any human
language he or she is exposed to). In this way, the theory of grammar is a
theory of human language and hence establishes the relationship among all
languages--not just those that happen to be related by historical accident
(for instance, via common ancestry)."
(Robert Freidin, Principles and Parameters in Comparative Grammar.
MIT, 1991)

4 GENERATIVE GRAMMAR:
In linguistics, generative grammar is grammar (or set of rules) that indicates the
structure and interpretation of sentences which native speakers of
a language accept as belonging to the language.

Adopting the term generative from mathematics, linguist Noam

Chomsky introduced the concept of generative grammar in the 1950s. This theory
is also known as transformational grammar, a term still used today.

Key Takeaways: Generative Grammar

• Generative grammar is a theory of grammar, first developed by Noam Chomsky

in the 1950s, that is based on the idea that all humans have an innate language
capacity.

• Linguists who study generative grammar are not interested in prescriptive

rules; rather, they are interested in uncovering the foundational principals that
guide all language production.

• Generative grammar accepts as a basic premise that native speakers of a

language will find certain sentences grammatical or ungrammatical, and that
these judgments give insight into the rules governing the use of that language.

Definition
Grammar refers to the set of rules that structure a language, including syntax
(the arrangement of words to form phrases and sentences) and morphology (the
study of words and how they are formed). Generative grammar is a theory of
grammar that holds that human language is shaped by a set of basic principles
that are part of the human brain (and even present in the brains of small
children). This "universal grammar," according to linguists like Chomsky, comes
from our innate language faculty.

In "Linguists for Non-Linguists," Frank Parker and Kathryn Riley argue that
generative grammar is a kind of "unconscious knowledge" that allows a person,
no matter what language they speak, to form correct sentences:

"Simply put, a generative grammar is a theory of competence: a model of the

psychological system of unconscious knowledge that underlies a speaker's ability
to produce and interpret utterances in a language...A good way of trying to
understand [Noam] Chomsky's point is to think of a generative grammar as
essentially a definition of competence: a set of criteria that linguistic structures
must meet to be judged acceptable."
Generative grammar is distinct from other grammars such as prescriptive
grammar, which attempts to establish standardized language rules that certain
usages "right" or "wrong," and descriptive grammar, which attempts to describe
language as it is actually used (including the study of pidgins and dialects).
Instead, generative grammar attempts to get at something deeper—the
foundational principles that make language possible across all of humanity.

For example, a prescriptive grammarian may study how parts of speech are
ordered in English sentences, with the goal of laying out rules (nouns precede
verbs in simple sentences, for example). A linguist studying generative grammar,
however, is more likely to be interested in issues such as how nouns are
distinguished from verbs across multiple languages.

Principles of Generative Grammar

The main principle of generative grammar is that all humans are born with an
innate capacity for language—and that this capacity shapes the rules for what is
considered "correct" grammar in a language. The idea of an innate language
capacity—or a "universal grammar"—is not accepted by all linguists. Some
believe, to the contrary, that all languages are learned, and therefore based on
certain constraints.

Proponents of the "universal grammar" argument believe that children, when

they are very young, are not exposed to enough linguistic information to learn the
rules of grammar. That children do in fact learn the rules of grammar is proof,
according to some linguists, that there is an innate language capacity that allows
them to overcome the "poverty of the stimulus."

Examples of Generative Grammar

As generative grammar is a "theory of competence," one way to test it is with
what is called a grammaticality judgment task. This involves presenting a native
speaker with a series of sentences and having them decide whether the sentences
are grammatical (acceptable) or ungrammatical (unacceptable). For example:

 The man is happy.

 Happy man is the.

A native speaker would judge the first sentence to be acceptable and the second
to be unacceptable. From this, we can make certain assumptions about the rules
governing the order of parts of speech in English sentences (for instance, a "to
be" verb linking a noun and an adjective must follow the noun and precede the
adjective).
5MENTAL GRAMMAR:
Mental grammar is the generative grammar stored in the brain that allows
a speaker to produce language that other speakers can understand. It is also
known as competence grammar and linguistic competence. It contrasts
with linguistic performance, which is the correctness of actual language use
according to a language's prescribed rules.

The concept of mental grammar was popularized by American linguist Noam

Chomsky in his groundbreaking work "Syntactic Structures" (1957).
Philippe Binder and Kenny Smith noted in "The Language Phenomenon" how
important Chomsky's work was: "This focus on grammar as a mental entity
allowed enormous progress to be made in characterizing the structure of
languages." Related to this work is Universal Grammar, or the predisposition for
the brain to learn complexities of grammar from an early age, without being
implicitly taught all the rules. The study of how the brain actually does this is
called neurolinguistics.

"One way to clarify mental or competence grammar is to ask a friend a question

about a sentence," Pamela J. Sharpe writes in "Barron's How to Prepare for the
TOEFL IBT." "Your friend probably won't know why it's correct, but that friend
will know if it's correct. So one of the features of mental or competence grammar
is this incredible sense of correctness and the ability to hear something that
'sounds odd' in a language."

It's a subconscious or implicit knowledge of grammar, not learned by rote. In

"The Handbook of Educational Linguistics," William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia
note,

"A central aspect of the knowledge of a particular language variety consists in its
grammar—that is, its implicit (or tacit or subconscious) knowledge of the rules of
pronunciation (phonology), of word structure (morphology), of sentence structure
(syntax), of certain aspects of meaning (semantics), and of a lexicon or vocabulary.
Speakers of a given language variety are said to have an implicit mental
grammar of that variety consisting of these rules and lexicon. It is this mental
grammar that determines in large part the perception and production of
speech utterances. Since the mental grammar plays a role in actual language use,
we must conclude that it is represented in the brain in some way.
"The detailed study of the language user's mental grammar is generally regarded
as the domain of the discipline of linguistics, whereas the study of the way in
which the mental grammar is put to use in the actual comprehension and
production of speech in linguistic performance has been a major concern
of psycholinguistics." (In "Monolingual Language Use and Acquisition: An
Introduction.")

Prior to the early 20th century and previous to Chomsky, it wasn't really
studied how humans acquire language or what exactly in ourselves makes us
different from animals, which don't use language like we do. It was just classified
abstractly that humans have "reason," or a "rational soul" as Descartes put it,
which really doesn't explain how we acquire language—especially as babies.
Babies and toddlers don't really receive grammar instruction on how to put words
together in a sentence, yet they learn their native tongue just by exposure to it.
Chomsky worked on what it was that was special about human brains that
enabled this learning.

6TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR:
The term traditional grammar generally refers to the collection
of prescriptive rules and concepts about the structure of language that is
commonly taught in schools.

Traditional English grammar (also known as school grammar) is largely based

on the principles of Latin grammar, not on current linguistic research in English.

See Examples and Observations below.

Observations
 "We say that traditional grammar is prescriptive because it focuses on
the distinction between what some people do with language and what
they ought to do with it, according to a pre-established standard. . . . The
chief goal of traditional grammar, therefore, is perpetuating a historical
model of what supposedly constitutes proper language."
(James D. Williams, The Teacher's Grammar Book. Routledge, 2005)
 "[G]rammarians of the 2000s are the inheritors of the distortions and
limitations imposed on English by two centuries of a Latinate perspective."
(David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.
Cambridge University Press, 2003)
 From Traditional Grammar to Sentence Grammar
"The first English grammars were translations of Latin grammars that had
been translations of Greek grammars in a tradition that was already some
two-thousand years old. Furthermore, from the seventeenth century
through the first half of the nineteenth century, there were no substantial
changes made in the form of English grammar books or in the way English
grammar was taught. When people talk about 'traditional' grammar,'
 this is the tradition they mean, or ought to mean. . . .
"Traditional grammar began to be challenged around the middle of the
[nineteenth] century, when the second major development in grammar
teaching appeared. There is no very good name for this second
development but we might call it 'sentence grammar.' Whereas traditional
grammar focused primarily on the word (hence its preoccupation
with parts of speech), the 'new' grammar of the 1850s focused on the
sentence. . . . It began to emphasize the grammatical importance of word
order and function words . . . in addition to the few inflexional endings in
English."
(John Algeo, "Linguistics: Where Do We Go From Here?" The English
Journal, January 1969)

 George Hillocks on the Negative Effects of Teaching Traditional

Grammar
"The study of traditional school grammar (i.e., the definition of parts
of speech, the parsing of sentences, etc.) has no effect on raising the quality
of student writing. Every other focus of instruction examined in this review
is stronger. Taught in certain ways, grammar and mechanics instruction
has a deleterious effect on student writing. In some studies a heavy
emphasis on mechanics and usage (e.g., marking every error) resulted in
significant losses in overall quality. School boards, administrators, and
teachers who impose the systematic study of traditional school grammar
on their students over lengthy periods of time in the name of teaching
writing do them a gross disservice that should not be tolerated by anyone
concerned with the effective teaching of good writing. We need to learn
how to teach standard usage and mechanics after careful analysis and with
minimal grammar."
(George Hillocks, Research on Written Composition: New Directions for
Teaching. National Council of Teachers, 1986)

 The Persistence of Traditional Grammar

"Why do the media cling to traditional grammar and its sometimes
outdated rules? Mainly because they like the prescriptive approach of
traditional grammar rather than the descriptive approach of structural
and transformational grammar. . . .
"Why? Inconsistencies in the style of a newspaper, online news site,
magazine or book draw attention to themselves when readers should
instead be concentrating on the content. . . .
"Besides, consistencies save time and money. . . . If we agree on
conventions, we can avoid wasting each other's time . . ..
"But the prescriptive rules have to be amended occasionally to reflect not
only changes in the language but also research that proves traditional
 advice may have been inaccurate. The work of linguists is essential for
making such calls on the best evidence available."
(Brian Brooks, James Pinson, and Jean Gaddy Wilson, Working with
Words. Macmillan, 2005)

7 TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR:
Transformational grammar is a theory of grammar that accounts for the
constructions of a language by linguistic transformations and phrase structures.
Also known as transformational-generative grammar or T-G or TGG.

Following the publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures in 1957,

transformational grammar dominated the field of linguistics for the next few
decades.

 "The era of Transformational-Generative Grammar, as it is called, signifies

a sharp break with the linguistic tradition of the first half of the [twentieth]
century both in Europe and America because, having as its principal
objective the formulation of a finite set of basic and transformational rules
that explain how the native speaker of a language can generate and
comprehend all its possible grammatical sentences, it focuses mostly
on syntax and not on phonology or morphology, as structuralism does"
(Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2005).

Observations
 "The new linguistics, which began in 1957 with the publication of Noam
Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, deserves the label 'revolutionary.' After
1957, the study of grammar would no longer be limited to what is said and
how it is interpreted. In fact, the word grammar itself took on a new
meaning. The new linguistics defined grammar as our innate,
subconscious ability to generate language, an internal system of rules that
constitutes our human language capacity. The goal of the new linguistics
was to describe this internal grammar.
"Unlike the structuralists, whose goal was to examine the sentences we
actually speak and to describe their systemic nature,
the transformationalists wanted to unlock the secrets of language: to
build a model of our internal rules, a model that would produce all of the
grammatical—and no ungrammatical—sentences." (M. Kolln and R.
Funk, Understanding English Grammar. Allyn and Bacon, 1998)
 "[F]rom the word go, it has often been clear that Transformational
Grammar was the best available theory of language structure, while
lacking any clear grasp of what distinctive claims the theory made about
 human language." (Geoffrey Sampson, Empirical Linguistics. Continuum,
2001)

Surface Structures and Deep Structures

 "When it comes to syntax, [Noam] Chomsky is famous for proposing that
beneath every sentence in the mind of a speaker is an invisible, inaudible
deep structure, the interface to the mental lexicon. The deep structure is
converted by transformational rules into a surface structure that
corresponds more closely to what is pronounced and heard. The rationale
is that certain constructions, if they were listed in the mind as surface
structures, would have to be multiplied out in thousands of redundant
variations that would have to have been learned one by one, whereas if the
constructions were listed as deep structures, they would be simple, few in
number, and economically learned." (Steven Pinker, Words and Rules.
Basic Books, 1999)

Transformational Grammar and the Teaching of Writing

 "Though it is certainly true, as many writers have pointed out,
that sentence-combining exercises existed before the advent
of transformational grammar, it should be evident that the
transformational concept of embedding gave sentence combining a
theoretical foundation upon which to build. By the time Chomsky and his
followers moved away from this concept, sentence combining had enough
momentum to sustain itself." (Ronald F. Lunsford, "Modern Grammar and
Basic Writers." Research in Basic Writing: A Bibliographic Sourcebook,
ed. by Michael G. Moran and Martin J. Jacobi. Greenwood Press, 1990)

The Transformation of Transformational Grammar

 "Chomsky initially justified replacing phrase-structure grammar by arguing
that it was awkward, complex, and incapable of providing adequate
accounts of language. Transformational grammar offered a simple and
elegant way to understand language, and it offered new insights into the
underlying psychological mechanisms.
 "As the grammar matured, however, it lost its simplicity and much of its
elegance. In addition, transformational grammar has been plagued by
Chomsky's ambivalence and ambiguity regarding meaning. . . . Chomsky
continued to tinker with transformational grammar, changing the theories
and making it more abstract and in many respects more complex, until all
but those with specialized training in linguistics were befuddled. . . .
  "[T]he tinkering failed to solve most of the problems because Chomsky
refused to abandon the idea of deep structure, which is at the heart of T-G
grammar but which also underlies nearly all of its problems. Such
complaints have fueled the paradigm shift to cognitive grammar." (James
D. Williams, The Teacher's Grammar Book. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999)

 "In the years since transformational grammar was formulated, it has

gone through a number of changes. In the most recent version, Chomsky
(1995) has eliminated many of the transformational rules in previous
versions of the grammar and replaced them with broader rules, such as a
rule that moves one constituent from one location to another. It was just
this kind of rule on which the trace studies were based. Although newer
versions of the theory differ in several respects from the original, at a
deeper level they share the idea that syntactic structure is at the heart of
our linguistic knowledge. However, this view has been controversial within
linguistics." (David W. Carroll, Psychology of Language, 5th ed. Thomson
Wadsworth, 2008)

8 UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR:
Universal grammar is the theoretical or hypothetical system of categories,
operations, and principles shared by all human languages and considered to be
innate. Since the 1980s, the term has often been capitalized. The term is also
known as Universal Grammar Theory.

Linguist Noam Chomsky explained, "'[U]niversal grammar' is taken to be the set

of properties, conditions, or whatever that constitute the 'initial state' of the
language learner, hence the basis on which knowledge of a language develops."
("Rules and Representations." Columbia University Press, 1980)

The concept is connected to the ability of children to be able to learn their native
language. "Generative grammarians believe that the human species evolved a
genetically universal grammar common to all peoples and that the variability in
modern languages is basically on the surface only," wrote Michael Tomasello.
("Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition."
Harvard University Press, 2003)

And Stephen Pinker elaborates thusly:

"In cracking the code of language...children's minds must be constrained to pick

out just the right kinds of generalizations from the speech around them....It is this
line of reasoning that led Noam Chomsky to propose that language acquisition in
children is the key to understanding the nature of language, and that children
must be equipped with an innate Universal Grammar: a set of plans for the
grammatical machinery that powers all human languages. This idea sounds more
controversial than it is (or at least more controversial than it should be) because
the logic of induction mandates that children make some assumptions about how
language works in order for them to succeed at learning a language at all. The
only real controversy is what these assumptions consist of: a blueprint for a
specific kind of rule system, a set of abstract principles, or a mechanism for
finding simple patterns (which might also be used in learning things other than
language)." ("The Stuff of Thought." Viking, 2007)

"Universal grammar is not to be confused with universal language," noted Elena

Lombardi, "or with the deep structure of language, or even with grammar itself"
("The Syntax of Desire," 2007). As Chomsky has observed, "[U]niversal grammar
is not a grammar, but rather a theory of grammars, a kind of metatheory or
schematism for grammar" ("Language and Responsibility," 1979).

History and Background

The concept of a universal grammar (UG) has been traced to the observation of
Roger Bacon, a 13th-century Franciscan friar, and philosopher, that all languages
are built upon a common grammar. The expression was popularized in the 1950s
and 1960s by Chomsky and other linguists.

Components that are considered to be universal include the notion that words
can be classified into different groups, such as being nouns or verbs and that
sentences follow a particular structure. Sentence structures may be different
between languages, but each language has some kind of framework so that
speakers can understand each other vs. speaking gibberish. Grammar rules,
borrowed words, or idioms of a particular language by definition are not
universal grammar.

Challenges and Criticisms

Of course, any theory in an academic setting will have challenges, comments, and
criticisms by others in the field; such as it is with peer review and the academic
world, where people build on the body of knowledge through writing academic
papers and publishing their opinions.

Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison noted in The Economist, "I and
many fellow linguists would estimate that we only have a detailed scientific
description of something like 10% to 15% of the world's languages, and for 85%
we have no real documentation at all. Thus it seems premature to begin
constructing grand theories of universal grammar. If we want to understand
universals, we must first know the particulars." ("Seven Questions for K. David
Harrison." Nov. 23, 2010)

And Jeff Mielke finds some aspects of universal grammar theory to be illogical:
"[T]he phonetic motivation for Universal Grammar is extremely weak. Perhaps
the most compelling case that can be made is that phonetics, like semantics, is
part of the grammar and that there is an implicit assumption that if the syntax is
rooted in Universal Grammar, the rest should be too. Most of the evidence for UG
is not related to phonology, and phonology has more of a guilt-by-association
status with respect to innateness." ("The Emergence of Distinctive Features."
Oxford University Press, 2008)

Iain McGilchrist disagrees with Pinkner and took the side of children learning a
language just through imitation, which is a behaviorist approach, as opposed to
the Chomsky theory of the poverty of the stimulus:

"[I]t is uncontroversial that the existence of a universal grammar such as

Chomsky conceived it is highly debatable. It remains remarkably speculative 50
years after he posited it, and is disputed by many important names in the field of
linguistics. And some of the facts are hard to square with it. Languages across the
world, it turns out, use a very wide variety of syntax to structure sentences. But
more importantly, the theory of universal grammar is not convincingly
compatible with the process revealed by developmental psychology, whereby
children actually acquire language in the real world. Children certainly evince a
remarkable ability to grasp spontaneously the conceptual and psycholinguistic
shapes of speech, but they do so in a far more holistic, than analytic, way. They
are astonishingly good imitators—note, not copying machines, but imitators."
("The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the
Western World." Yale University Press, 2009)

9 LINGUISTIC PERFORMACE :
Linguistic performance is the ability to produce and comprehend sentences in
a language.

Since the publication of Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in

1965, most linguists have made a distinction between linguistic competence, a
speaker's tacit knowledge of the structure of a language, and linguistic
performance, which is what a speaker actually does with this knowledge.

See also:

 Chomskyan Linguistics
  Communicative Competence
 Lexical Competence
 Pragmatic Competence
 Psycholinguistics

Factors That Influence Linguistic Performance

" Linguistic performance and its products are in fact complex phenomena.
The nature and characteristics of a particular instance of linguistic performance
and its product(s) are, in reality, determined by a combination of factors:

(6) Some of the factors which influence linguistic performance are:

(a) the linguistic competence or unconscious linguistic knowledge of the speaker-
hearer,
(b) the nature and limitations of the speaker-hearer's speech production and
speech perception mechanisms,
(c) the nature and limitations of the speaker-hearer's memory, concentration,
attention and other mental capacities,
(d) the social environment and status of the speaker-hearer,
(e) the dialectal environment of the speaker-hearer,
(f) the idiolect and individual style of speaking of the speaker-hearer,
(g) the speaker-hearer's factual knowledge and view of the world in which he
lives,
(h) the speaker-hearer's state of health, his emotional state, and other similar
incidental circumstances.

Each of the factors mentioned in (6) is a variable in linguistic performance and,

as such, may influence the nature and characteristics of a particular instance of
linguistic performance and its product(s)."
Rudolf P. Botha, The Conduct of Linguistic Inquiry: A Systematic Introduction to the Methodology
of Generative Grammar. Mouton, 1981

Chomsky on Linguistic Competence and Linguistic Performance

 "In [Noam] Chomsky's theory, our linguistic competence is our

unconscious knowledge of languages and is similar in some ways to
[Ferdinand de] Saussure's concept of langue, the organizing principles of a
language. What we actually produce as utterances are similar to
Saussure's parole, and is called linguistic performance."
Kristin Denham and Anne Lobeck, Linguistics for Everyone. Wadsworth, 2010
 "Chomsky divides linguistic theory into two parts: linguistic competence
and linguistic performance. The former concerns the tacit knowledge
of grammar, the latter the realization of this knowledge in actual
performance. Chomsky distinctly relegates linguistic performance to the
 peripherals of linguistic inquiry. Linguistic performance as the actual use
of language in concrete situations is viewed as 'fairly degenerate in quality'
(Chomsky 1965, 31) because performance is full of errors.
 " . . . Chomsky's linguistic competence corresponds to la langue, and
Chomsky's linguistic performance corresponds to la parole. Chomsky's
linguistic competence, however, because it is concerned primarily with the
underlying competence, is viewed as superior to de Saussure's la langue."
Marysia Johnson, A Philosophy of Second Language Acquisition. Yale University
Press, 2004

 "Competence concerns our abstract knowledge of our language. It is about

the judgments we would make about language if we had sufficient time and
memory capacity. In practice, of course, our actual linguistic
performance—the sentences that we actually produce--is limited by
these factors. Furthermore, the sentences we actually produce often use the
more simple grammatical constructions. Our speech is full of false starts,
hesitations, speech errors, and corrections. The actual ways in which we
produce and understand sentences are also in the domain of performance.
 "In his more recent work, Chomsky (1986) distinguished between
externalized language (E-language) and internalized language (I-
language). For Chomsky, E-language linguistics is about collecting
samples of language and understanding their properties; in particular, it is
about describing the regularities of a language in the form of a grammar. I-
language linguistics is about what speakers know about their language. For
Chomsky, the primary aim of modern linguistics should be to specify I-
language: it is to produce a grammar that describes our knowledge of the
language, not the sentences we actually produce."
Trevor A. Harley, The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory, 2nd ed.
Psychology Press, 2001