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The term "universal grammar" is placeholder for whichever domain-specific features of linguistic competence turn out to be innate. Within generative grammar, it is generally accepted that there must be some such features, and one of the goals of generative research is to formulate and test hypotheses about which aspects those are.
For example, With overwhelmingly greater-than-chance frequency, languages with normal SOV order are postpositional. Strictly speaking, a tendency is not a kind of universal, but exceptions to most statements called universals can be found. For example, Latin is an SOV language with prepositions. Often it turns out that these exceptional ...
The American linguist Joseph Greenberg (1915–2001) proposed a set of linguistic universals based primarily on a set of 30 languages. The following list is verbatim from the list printed in the appendix of Greenberg's Universals of Language [1] and "Universals Restated", [2] [3] sorted by context.
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).
Within this framework, the goal of linguistics is to identify all of the principles and parameters that are universal to human language (called universal grammar). As such, any attempt to explain the syntax of a particular language using a principle or parameter is cross-examined with the evidence available in other languages.
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]
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.
By hypothesis, I-language—also called universal grammar—corresponds to the initial state of the human language faculty in individual human development. Minimalism is reductive in that it aims to identify which aspects of human language—as well the computational system that underlies it—are conceptually necessary.