Universal Grammar

Ahmad Ameri-Golestan
 Universal Grammar
• Aims of linguistic research
• The goals of a linguistic theory, as defined in Chomsky 1986, are to
answer three basic questions about human language:
• 1. What constitutes knowledge of language?
• 2. How is knowledge of language acquired?
• 3. How is knowledge of language put to use?
 Universal Grammar
1. What constitutes knowledge of language?
• Linguistic theory aims to describe the mental representations of language
that are stored in the human mind. It aims to define what all human
languages have in common, as well as the distinctive characteristics that
make human language different from other systems of communication. It
also needs to specify in what way individual human languages can differ
from one another.
Universal Grammar: the core “principles and parameters “ and the
preffery “ what surrounds the core”

• The Universal Grammar approach claims that all human beings inherit a
universal set of principles and parameters that control the shape human
languages can take, and which are what make human languages similar to
one another. In his Government and Binding theory, Chomsky (1981,
1986, 1986) argues that the core of human language must comprise
these two components.
 Universal Grammar
• His proposed principles (for example, EPP [Extended Projection
Principle] which means ‘All the sentences in a language must have a
subject’) are unvarying and apply to all natural languages; in contrast,
parameters (for example, Head Parameter which means ‘Phrases in
different languages can be either head-first or head-last’) possess a
limited number of open values which characterize differences between
languages (parametric variation).
 Universal Grammar
• In his Minimalist Program, Chomsky (1995, 2000) argues that the core of human language
is the lexicon (the word store), which can be characterized as follows:

Lexical Categories :the actual content word we have like verb,noun and these are responsible of
the meaning that we communicate.

Lexicon
Functional Categories
 Universal Grammar
• Lexical categories include 'content' words such as verbs and nouns, and
functional categories include 'grammatical' words such as determiners or
auxiliaries, as well as abstract grammatical features such as Tense or
Agreement, which may be realized morphologically.
• In the Minimalist Program, parametric variation is located within the lexicon,
primarily within functional categories, which are characterized by a bundle of
functional features that vary from language to language, causing the various
surface differences in word order, morphology, etc., which we are familiar
with.
 Universal Grammar
2. How is knowledge of language acquired?
How does the child create the mental construct that is language? Chomsky
first resorted to the concept of Universal Grammar because he believes that
children could not learn their first language so quickly and effortlessly
without the help of an innate language faculty to guide them.
 Universal Grammar
The arguments put forward, often referred to as the ‘logical problem of
language learning’” poverty of stimulus “, are that based on messy input
(spoken language is full of false starts, slips of the tongue, etc.), children
create a mental representation of language which not only goes beyond the
input they are exposed to, but is also strikingly similar to that of other native
speakers of the same language variety.
 Universal Grammar
• If there is a biologically endowed Universal Grammar, this would make
the task facing children much easier, by providing a genetic blueprint
which determines in advance the shape which language will take. This
would also explain why the different languages of the world are strikingly
similar in many respects.
 Universal Grammar
3. How is knowledge of language put to use?
The Universal Grammar approach to language is concerned with knowledge
of language, that is, with the abstract mental representation of language and
the computational mechanisms associated with it, which all human beings
possess, called competence. It is NOT about performance, about how
language is used in real life.
 Universal Grammar
• Performance is the domain of a theory of language use, in which linguistic
competence is only one aspect, and factors such as the brain's information-
processing capacity also come into play.
• Although Chomsky acknowledges that this is an important area for
research, he has been concerned almost exclusively with addressing the
first two issues.
 Universal Grammar
• Arguments from first language acquisition
• In this section, we will review in some more detail the arguments that
support the existence of an innate language faculty in children. We will
base our discussion on a brief outline about first language acquisition, the
main characteristics of which are briefly summarized below:
 Universal Grammar: route :the stages children follow to learn
rate: the speed of learning

• children go through developmental stages

• these stages are very similar across children for a given language,
although the rate at which individual children progress through them is
variable
• these stages are similar across languages
 Universal Grammar
• child language is rule-governed and systematic, and the rules created by
the child do not necessarily correspond to adult ones”” all of them have
the same mistakes as in pp of “go” in use.
• children are resistant to correction
• children's processing capacity limits the number of rules they can apply at
any one time, and they will revert to earlier hypotheses when two or more
rules compete.