What is Universal Grammar?

DEFINITION: According to Cook, (1997, p. 262) “Universal Grammar is a black box responsible for
language acquisition. It is a mechanism in mind which allows children to construct a grammar out of raw
language material supplied by their parents”

Why a Universal Grammar?

According to Chomsky, UG is not just concerned with second language acquisition. Its main goals, as
defined for example in Chomsky (1986a), are to answer three basic questions about human language.

1. What constitutes knowledge of language? / What does UG knowledge consist of?

It aims to define what all human languages have in common as well as the distinctive characteristics
which make human languages different from other systems of communication. It also needs to specify in
what way all the human languages can differ from one another.

Although, all human languages have a great deal in common which enables us to translate from one
language to another without too many difficulties, but it is equally obvious that they are also very
different from one another as our struggle to learn foreign languages, clearly shows.

Universal Grammar approach claims that all human beings inherit a universal set of principles and
parameters which control and shape human languages can make.

Principles are unvarying and apply to all natural languages; in contrast, parameters possess a limited
number of open values which characterize the differences between different languages.

2. How is knowledge of language acquired?

The learner learns a language unconsciously. It is a natural process of leaning a language by the using
the mental abilities to learn a language. The innate ability helps the children to learn a language. The
children create a mental image of what they hear and then use his own mental abilities to create a
word.

3. How the learned language is used?

In the starting the child is able to create the words by using his mental abilities then after sometime
when he was able to create words he then wants to create more complex structure. He start creating
phrases , sentences and finally able to create a story.

What does UG consist of?

Chomsky proposes that U.G consists of a set of innate principles and parameters that are universal to all
human languages.

Principles:
“Aspects of human language present in all human minds”
Principles are the properties/features that are common in all the languages.

Principle of structure dependency

The principle of structure dependency which states that knowledge of language relies on the structural
relationship in the sentence rather than on the sequence of the words. The elements depend on each
other that are why we called it dependent structure.

The principle of structure dependency is based on phrase structure role.

Example: “The little girl brought the beautiful butterfly.” (The sentence is grammatically &
syntactically correct).

“The beautiful butterfly brought the little girl”. (The sentence is syntactically is correct
but semantically not).

Concept of phrase structure

In order to understand structure dependency, we need first to establish the concept of phrase structure
within which these relationships take place. A major assumption in linguistics since 1930’s has been that
sentences consists of phrase structural groupings of words. Phrase structure can be represented in many
ways, some of which are given below:

 (Tree Diagram
 Labeled Bracketing
 Rewrite Rule) from the article

The projection Principle: from the article.