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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.
He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.
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 ...
In Government and Binding theory, Chomsky is interested in the initial state of linguistic competence in a child, which is called a human's biological endowment for language. Since every normal human child is capable of acquiring any language, this endowment is also called by the name of universal grammar.
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 ...
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]
Principles and parameters was largely formulated by the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik. Many linguists have worked within this framework, and for a period of time it was considered the dominant form of mainstream generative linguistics. [1] Principles and parameters as a grammar framework is also known as government and binding theory.