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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.
Noam Chomsky's theory of a universal grammar (UG) aims to describe the grammatical constraints common across naturally arising human language. One constraint is the projection principle —that lexical features are preserved at every syntactic level.
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.
In their 1977 article "Filters and Control", Chomsky and Howard Lasnik extended this to view markedness as part of a theory of 'core grammar': We will assume that [Universal Grammar] is not an 'undifferentiated' system, but rather incorporates something analogous to a 'theory of markedness' Specifically, there is a theory of core grammar with ...
As the implication works only one way, the proposed universal is a unidirectional one. Linguistic universals in syntax are sometimes held up as evidence for universal grammar (although epistemological arguments are more common). Other explanations for linguistic universals have been proposed, for example, that linguistic universals tend to be ...
In Chomsky's opinion, in order for a linguistic theory to be justified on "internal grounds" and to achieve "explanatory adequacy", it has to show how a child's brain, when exposed to primary linguistic data, uses special innate abilities or strategies (described as a set of principles called "Universal Grammar") and selects the correct grammar ...
The theory of grammar meets the criterion of conceptual necessity; this is the Strong Minimalist Thesis introduced by Chomsky in (2001). [5] Consequently, language is an optimal association of sound with meaning; the language faculty satisfies only the interface conditions imposed by the A-P and C-I performance systems; PF and LF are the only ...
This pattern is consistent with two grammars. In one grammar, a long vowel bears stress if it is the last segment in the word. This is a rule based on absolute finality. In the other grammar, a long vowel bears stress only if it is the last vowel in the word (i.e., even if it is not the last segment of the word).