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Noam Chomsky proposed the theory of Universal Grammar, which argues that all human languages share certain innate syntactic rules and principles embedded in the brain. According to Chomsky, children are able to easily learn language because their brains are predisposed with knowledge of these universal structures, rather than learning through imitation alone. Chomsky and other linguists have shown that while the world's 5000-6000 languages have different grammars, they all conform to a basic set of rules, providing evidence that Universal Grammar exists and facilitates language acquisition.

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Tool Module

Noam Chomsky proposed the theory of Universal Grammar, which argues that all human languages share certain innate syntactic rules and principles embedded in the brain. According to Chomsky, children are able to easily learn language because their brains are predisposed with knowledge of these universal structures, rather than learning through imitation alone. Chomsky and other linguists have shown that while the world's 5000-6000 languages have different grammars, they all conform to a basic set of rules, providing evidence that Universal Grammar exists and facilitates language acquisition.

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Meriem Adem
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© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Tool Module: Chomsky’s Universal Grammar

During the first half of the 20th century, linguists who theorized about the human ability to speak did so from the
behaviourist perspective that prevailed at that time. They therefore held that language learning, like any other
kind of learning, could be explained by a succession of trials, errors, and rewards for success. In other words,
children learned their mother tongue by simple imitation, listening to and repeating what adults said.

This view became radically questioned, however, by the American


linguist Noam Chomsky. For Chomsky, acquiring language cannot
be reduced to simply developing an inventory of responses to
stimuli, because every sentence that anyone produces can be a
totally new combination of words. When we speak, we combine a
finite number of elements—the words of our language—to create
an infinite number of larger structures—sentences.

Moreover, language is governed by a large number of rules and


principles, particularly those of syntax, which determine the order
of words in sentences. The term “generative grammar”refers to
the set of rules that enables us to understand sentences but of
which we are usually totally unaware. It is because of generative
grammar that everyone says “that’s how you say it” rather than
“how that’s you it say”, or that the words “Bob”and “him” cannot
mean the same person in the sentence “Bob loves him.” but can
do so in “Bob knows that his father loves him.” (Note in passing
that generative grammar has nothing to do with grammar
textbooks, whose purpose is simply to explain what is
grammatically correct and incorrect in a given language.)

Even before the age of 5, children can, without having had any
formal instruction, consistently produce and interpret sentences
that they have never encountered before. It is this extraordinary
ability to use language despite having had only very partial
exposure to the allowable syntactic variants that led Chomsky to
formulate his “poverty of the stimulus” argument, which was the
foundation for the new approach that he proposed in the early
1960s.

In Chomsky’s view, the reason that children so easily master the complex operations of language is that they
have innate knowledge of certain principles that guide them in developing the grammar of their language. In
other words, Chomsky’s theory is that language learning is facilitated by a predisposition that our brains have
for certain structures of language.

But what language? For Chomsky’s theory to hold true, all of the languages in the world must share certain
structural properties. And indeed, Chomsky and other generative linguists like him have shown that the 5000 to
6000 languages in the world, despite their very different grammars, do share a set of syntactic rules and
principles. These linguists believe that this “universal grammar” is innate and is embedded somewhere in the
neuronal circuitry of the human brain. And that would be why children can select, from all the sentences that
come to their minds, only those that conform to a “deep structure” encoded in the brain’s circuits.

Universal grammar

Universal grammar, then, consists of a set of unconscious constraints that let us decide whether a sentence is
correctly formed. This mental grammar is not necessarily the same for all languages. But according to
Chomskyian theorists, the process by which, in any given language, certain sentences are perceived as correct
while others are not, is universal and independent of meaning.

Thus, we immediately perceive that the sentence “Robert book reads the” is not correct English, even though
we have a pretty good idea of what it means. Conversely, we recognize that a sentence such as “Colorless
green ideas sleep furiously.” is grammatically correct English, even though it is nonsense.

A pair of dice offers a useful metaphor to explain what Chomsky means when he refers to universal grammar
as a “set of constraints”. Before we throw the pair of dice, we know that the result will be a number from 2 to 12,
but nobody would take a bet on its being 3.143. Similarly, a newborn baby has the potential to speak any of a
number of languages, depending on what country it is born in, but it will not just speak them any way it likes: it

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