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Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be.
The core of this theory lies on the existence of an innate universal grammar, grounded on the poverty of the stimulus. [10] The UG model of principles, basic properties which all languages share, and parameters, properties which can vary between languages, has been the basis for much second-language research.
The term universal grammar refers to the set of constraints on what a possible human language could be. Within approaches that accept universal grammar, language acquisition is viewed as a process of using sensory input to filter through the set of possible grammars that conform to UG. [27] [28]
This led to his proposal for a shared underlying grammar structure for all languages, a concept he called universal grammar (UG), which he claimed must exist somewhere in the human brain prior to language acquisition. Chomsky defines UG as "the system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages ...
The generative approach to second language (L2) acquisition (SLA) is a cognitive based theory of SLA that applies theoretical insights developed from within generative linguistics to investigate how second languages and dialects are acquired and lost by individuals learning naturalistically or with formal instruction in foreign, second language and lingua franca settings.
The universal grammar is a study of "I-language" (internalized language), not "E-language" (externalized language). Cook distinguishes Chomsky's linguistic universals from implicational universals. [1] On first-language acquisition (FLA), Cook presents Chomsky's nativist perspective—that humans are born with innate knowledge of natural language.
The learning mechanism in their model is based on linguistic theories of Chomsky (1980, 1993)– the language acquisition device (LAD) and the notion of universal grammar. The results of their model show that the critical period for language acquisition is an " evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS)" (Komarova & Nowak, 2001, p. 1190).
The language faculty consists of a computational system (C HL) whose initial state (S 0) contains invariant principles and parameters. Language acquisition consists of acquiring a lexicon and fixing the parameter values of the target language. Language generates an infinite set of expressions given as a sound-meaning pair (π, λ).