Universal Grammar

“Universal grammar is the black box responsible for language

acquisition. It is the mechanism in the mind which allows children to
construct a grammar out of the raw language materials supplied by
their parents.”
(Cook 1997, p. 262)

The theory of universal grammar was presented by a famous

American Linguist Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at MIT, in
60s. This theory was extension of “Theory of Mentalism” presented by
Chomsky in 1960. When Chomsky presented theory of Mentalism
some questions were raised about language acquisition. i.e.,
1) If there is LAD in which basic structure of every language is present
then why it is difficult to acquire second language easily?
2) Why it is difficult for a learner to speak second language exactly as
its native speakers do?

In order to answer the above questions Chomsky presented his “Theory

of Universal Grammar”

Universal Grammar:
The grammatical properties common to all languages and innately
present in human beings. Such properties as have been identified are
called Language Universals.
Naom 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 held that there is an universal grammar hard-wired into
the brain of all humans, and that all human languages had evolved on
the top of that Universal Grammar.
Universal Language theory holds that the speaker knows a set of
principles apply to all languages, and parameters that vary within clearly
defined limits from one language to another.

What does U.G. consists of?

⇒ Principles
⇒ Parameters

Principles:
 Set of rules that all languages have in common.
The principle we are going to concentrate on is the Principle of Structure
Dependency.

 Structure Dependency:

It states that in any language a sentence is consists of a Subject

and Predicate; it means that all languages are structure dependent.
i.e.,
Ali went to school.
In this sentence “Ali” is subject and “went to school” is predicate.
Linguist use the term Noun Phrase for subject and Verb Phrase for
predicate.

Sentence= NP+VP

Michael Jackson died.

NP + VP
Without any of the phrase a sentence is incomplete, i.e., if we remove NP
or VP the sentence will not make any sense to us.
This is not only the case with English language but for all languages.
She ran into the kitchen.
Here “she” is NP or a noun or a word. “ran into the kitchen” is a VP, it
also consists of many phrases i.e.,
“into the kitchen” is an adverb phrase or prepositional phrase.
“the kitchen” is a noun phrase in which “the” is article and “kitchen” is
noun.

 Interrogative Inversion:

If we briefly consider the formation of the interrogative. This is

formed, in English, by a movement known as Interrogative Inversion,
which operates in the manner below:

I) John will stay behind.

II) Will john stay behind?
From an initial glance we might think the rule for forming questions
simply involved moving the second word in the sentence of the first. That
this is not the case can be demonstrated by the following pair:

III) John and Mary will stay behind.

IV) *And John Mary will stay behind?

The correct form of the interrogative here, of course, is

V) Will John and Mary stay behind?

To form a question of this type correctly requires an inversion of the

subject, John and Mary, with the auxiliary VERB, will. This means that
we must possess, in our minds, the concepts such as ‘subject of a
sentence’, and ‘auxiliary verb’. Without this elementary structure we
would never be able to understand how questions were formed. And we
must also implicitly aware of another formal universal: that all languages
are category-based. Every language have Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and
Adverbs, although the individual items which count as such may vary
from language to language. Formal universals, then, are very general
principles which all languages obey, although they don’t all obey them in
the same way (not every language forms questions in the manner
English choose to).

“Structure-dependency can therefore be put forward as a universal

principle of language: whenever elements of the sentence are moved to
form passive, questions, or whatever, such movement takes account of
the structural relationships of the sentence rather than the linear order of
words.”
(Cook and Newson 1996, p.11)

Parameters:
Set of rules that vary from language to language.
Every human being in his LAD contains principles of all the languages but
not the parameters. To learn the second language we have to learn those
parameters.

 Sentence Structure:
One such parameter, for example, accounts for a distinction
between those languages which allow sentence to be formed without a
subject, and those which do not. In Italian, Parla Francese, is a well-
formed sentence, but the equivalent in English, Speaks French, isn’t. The
difference is that Italian allows for an understood subject, he/she ,
whereas English doesn’t. Language like Italian, which have subjectless
sentences of this type, are called pro-drop languages, and it has been
found that they share a number of other characteristics, such as the
ability to change the order of subject and verb – in Italian, Falls the night
is just as acceptable as The night falls.
 Head Parameter:
This has to do with the word-order variation within phrases
containing a head word and a complement; they none the less vary as to
whether the head word comes before the complement or after it. In
English the head word comes first, as the following phrases illustrate:
i. Student of Physics (Noun phrase)
ii. In the kitchen. (Prepositional phrase)
iii. Go with him. (Verb phrase)
iv. Keen on football. (Adjective phrase)
Each phrase has a central element, called a head; in the case of a noun
phrase, the head is the noun, in the case of verb phrase, the head is
verb, in the case of adjective phrase, the head is adjective, and in the
case of prepositional phrase, the head is preposition, and so on. For
example, in the noun phrase student of Physics the head-noun student
appears to the left of the complement of Physics. In fact English is a head
-first language, because head of the phrase always appears before its
complements.
Japanese, Chinese and Korean are head-last languages, because the
complements precede the head inside phrases.
In Japanese the phrase keen on football is written football on
keen.