Universal grammar

UNIVERSAL GRAMMARJonathan Manantan MensalvasMaster of Arts in Education Major in English Language Teaching

WHAT IS UG?

is a theory in linguistics,

usually credited to Noam

Chomsky, proposing that the ability to

learn grammar is hard-wired into the brain.

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG)

The theory suggests that linguistic ability manifests itself without being taught and that there are properties that all natural human languages share. It is a matter of observation and experimentation to determine precisely what abilities are innate and what properties are shared by all languages.

• Linguist Noam Chomsky made the argument that the human brain contains a limited set of rules for organizing language. In turn, there is an assumption that all languages have a common structural basis. This set of rules is known as universal grammar.

• Chomsky has stated "I think, yet the world thinks in me", which exemplifies the fact that he believes that since humans have undergone evolution and have been created by nature, that Universal Grammar is a biological evolutionary trait, and therefore common to all humans.

CHOMSKY'S THEORY

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG)• Speakers proficient in a language know what expressions

are acceptable in their language and what expressions are unacceptable. The key puzzle is how speakers should come to know the restrictions of their language, since expressions which violate those restrictions are not present in the input, indicated as such. This absence of negative evidence—that is, absence of evidence that an expression is part of a class of the ungrammatical sentences in one's language—is the core of the poverty of stimulus argument. For example, in English one cannot relate a question word like 'what' to a predicate within a relative clause (1):

• (1) *What did John meet a man who sold?

• Such expressions are not available to the language learners, because they are, by hypothesis, ungrammatical for speakers of the local language. Speakers of the local language do not utter such expressions and note that they are unacceptable to language learners. Universal grammar offers a solution to the poverty of the stimulus problem by making certain restrictions universal characteristics of human languages. Language learners are consequently never tempted to generalize in an illicit fashion.

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG)

ETYMOLOGY:• The concept of universal grammar 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 Noam Chomsky and other linguists

OBSERVATIONS

• "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.

OBSERVATION

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)."

OBSERVATION

• "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."(Michael Tomasello, Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Harvard Univ. Press, 2003)

OBSERVATION

• "There is a broad measure of agreement that the following are universal:

• - some lexical categories (noun and verb);- structure-dependency;- phrases containing a head of the same type as the phrase;- a phrase structure consisting of Specifier, Head, and Complement.

UG theory accepts that languages may deviate to some degree from the universal pattern. A language user's competence is said to consist of a core grammar of universal principles and parameters and a periphery of features specific to the language in question, which cannot be explained by reference to UG. They might be survivals from an earlier stage of the language, loans from other languages or fixed idioms."

(John Field, Psycholinguistics: The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2004)

OBSERVATION

• "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."(K. David Harrison, linguist at Swarthmore College, in "Seven Questions for K. David Harrison." The Economist, Nov. 23, 2010)

OBSERVATION

• Presence of creole languages

• Presence of creole languages• Presence of creole

languages• Presence of creole

languages

The presence of creole languages is sometimes cited as further support for this theory, especially by Bickerton’s controversial language bio program theory.

• Creoles are languages that are developed and formed when different societies come together and are forced to devise their own system of communication. The system used by the original speakers is typically an inconsistent mix of vocabulary items known as a pidgin. As these speakers' children begin to acquire their first language, they use the pidgin input to effectively create their own original language, known as a creole. Unlike pidgins, creoles have native speakers and make use of a full grammar.

CREOLE LANGUAGES

• According to Bickerton, the idea of universal grammar is supported by creole languages because certain features are shared by virtually all of these languages.

For example, their default point of reference in time (expressed by bare verb stems) is not the present moment, but the past. Using pre-verbal auxiliaries, they uniformly express tense, aspect, and mood. Negative concord occurs, but it affects the verbal subject (as opposed to the object, as it does in languages like Spanish). Another similarity among creoles is that questions are created simply by changing a declarative sentence's intonation, not its word order or content.

10 Universal Characteristics of any language

L1 L2UG

Still related through UG

The user can code switch and extract one system of a

language to affect the other

Word order

• Word order

• Morphological marking – attached or unattached/affixes

• Tone – rising, falling, midtone

• Agreement –singular-singular/plural-plural

• Reduce reference

• Nouns/noun clauses

• Verb/verb clauses

• Predication

• Negation

• Question