Universal grammar
Encyclopedia
Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics
that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.
Usually credited to Noam Chomsky
, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar
are hard-wired into the brain
, and manifest themselves without being taught
. There is still much argument whether there is such a thing and what it would be.
s from verb
s, or distinguishing function word
s from lexical words) then property X is a property of universal grammar in this most general sense (here not capitalized).
There are theoretical senses of the term Universal Grammar as well (here capitalized). The most general of these would be that Universal Grammar is whatever properties of a normally developing human brain cause it to learn languages that conform to universal grammar (the non-capitalized, pretheoretical sense). Using the above examples, Universal Grammar would be the property that the brain has that causes it to posit a difference between nouns and verbs whenever presented with linguistic data..
As Chomsky puts it, "Evidently, development of language in the individual must involve three factors: (1) genetic endowment, which sets limits on the attainable languages, thereby making language acquisition possible; (2) external
data, converted to the experience that selects one or another language within a narrow range; (3) principles
not specific to FL." [FL is the faculty of language, whatever properties of the brain cause it to learn language.] So (1) is Universal Grammar in the first theoretical sense, (2) is the linguistic data which the child is exposed to.
Sometimes aspects of Universal Grammar in this sense seem to be describable in terms of general facts about cognition.
For example, if a predisposition to categorize events and objects as different classes of things is part of human cognition, and as a direct result nouns and verbs show up in all languages, then it could be said that this aspect of Universal Grammar is not specific to language, but is part of cognition more generally. To distinguish properties of languages that can be traced to other facts about cognition from properties of languages that cannot, the abbreviation UG* can be used. UG is the term often used by Chomsky for those aspects of the human brain which cause language to be the way it is (i.e. are Universal Grammar in the sense used here) but here for discussion it is used for those aspects which are furthermore specific to language (thus UG, as Chomsky uses it, is just an abbreviation for Universal Grammar, but UG* as used here is a subset of Universal Grammar).
In the same article, Chomsky casts the theme of a larger research program in terms of the following question: "How little can be attributed to UG while still accounting for the variety of I-languages attained, relying on third factor principles?" (I-languages meaning internal languages, the brain states that correspond to knowing how to speak and understand a particular language, and third factor principles meaning (3) in the previous quote).
Chomsky has speculated that UG might be extremely simple and abstract, for example only a mechanism for combining symbols in a particular way, which he calls Merge. To see that Chomsky does not use the term "UG" in the narrow sense UG* suggested above, consider the following quote from the same article:
"The conclusion that Merge falls within UG holds whether such recursive generation is unique to FL or is
appropriated from other systems."
I.e. Merge is part of UG because it causes language to be the way it is, is universal, and is not part of (2) (the environment) or (3) (general properties independent of genetics and environment). Merge is part of Universal Grammar whether it is specific to language or whether, as Chomsky suggests, it is also used for example in mathematical thinking.
The distinction is important because there is a long history of argument about UG*, whereas most people working on language agree that there is Universal Grammar. Many people assume that Chomsky means UG* when he writes UG (and in some cases he might actually mean UG*, though not in the passage quoted above).
Some students of universal grammar study a variety of grammars to abstract generalizations called linguistic universal
s, often in the form of "If X holds true, then Y occurs." These have been extended to a variety of traits, such as the phonemes found in languages, what word orders languages choose, and why children exhibit certain linguistic behaviors.
The idea can be traced to Roger Bacon
's observation that all languages are built upon a common grammar, substantially the same in all languages, even though it may undergo in them accidental variations, and the 13th century speculative grammarians who, following Bacon, postulated universal rules underlying all grammars. The concept of a universal grammar or language was at the core of the 17th century projects for philosophical language
s. The 18th century in Scotland saw the emergence of a vigorous universal grammar school. Later linguists who have influenced this theory include Noam Chomsky
and Richard Montague
, developing their version of the theory as they considered issues of the Argument from poverty of the stimulus to arise from the constructivist approach to linguistic theory. The application of the idea to the area of second language acquisition (SLA) is represented mainly by the McGill linguist Lydia White
.
Most syntacticians generally concede that there are parametric points of variation between languages, although heated debate occurs over whether UG constraints are essentially universal due to being "hard-wired" (Chomsky's Principles and Parameters
approach), a logical consequence of a specific syntactic architecture (the Generalized Phrase Structure approach) or the result of functional constraints on communication (the functionalist approach).
The idea can be traced to Roger Bacon
's observation that all languages are built upon a common grammar, substantially the same in all languages, even though it may undergo accidental variations, and the 13th century speculative grammarians who, following Bacon, postulated universal rules underlying all grammars. The concept of a universal grammar or language was at the core of the 17th century projects for philosophical language
s. There is a Scottish school of universal grammarians from the 18th century, to be distinguished from the philosophical language project, and including authors such as James Beattie
, Hugh Blair
, James Burnett, James Harris
, and Adam Smith
. The article on "Grammar" in the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica
(1771) contains an extensive section titled "Of Universal Grammar."
The idea rose to notability in modern linguistics with theorists such as Noam Chomsky
and Richard Montague
, developed in the 1950s to 1970s, as part of the "Linguistics Wars
".
Noam Chomsky
made the argument
that the human brain
contains a limited set of rules for organizing language. In turn, there is an assumption that all languages have a common structural basis. This set of rules is known as universal grammar.
Speakers proficient in a language know what expressions are acceptable in their language and what expressions are unacceptable. The key puzzle is how speakers should come to know the restrictions of their language, since expressions which violate those restrictions are not present in the input, indicated as such. This absence of negative evidence—that is, absence of evidence that an expression is part of a class of the ungrammatical sentences in one's language—is the core of the poverty of stimulus argument. For example, in English one cannot relate a question word like 'what' to a predicate within a relative clause (1):
(1) *What did John meet a man who sold?
Such expressions are not available to the language learners, because they are, by hypothesis, ungrammatical for speakers of the local language. Speakers of the local language do not utter such expressions and note that they are unacceptable to language learners. Universal grammar offers a solution to the poverty of the stimulus problem by making certain restrictions universal characteristics of human languages. Language learners are consequently never tempted to generalize in an illicit fashion.
s is sometimes cited as further support for this theory, especially by Bickerton's
controversial language bioprogram theory
. Creoles are languages that are developed and formed when different societies come together and are forced to devise their own system of communication. The system used by the original speakers is typically an inconsistent mix of vocabulary items known as a pidgin
. As these speakers' children begin to acquire their first language, they use the pidgin input to effectively create their own original language, known as a creole
. Unlike pidgins, creoles have native speaker
s and make use of a full grammar.
According to Bickerton, the idea of universal grammar is supported by creole languages because certain features are shared by virtually all of these languages. For example, their default point of reference in time (expressed by bare verb stems) is not the present moment, but the past. Using pre-verbal auxiliaries
, they uniformly express tense
, aspect
, and mood
. Negative concord occurs, but it affects the verbal subject (as opposed to the object, as it does in languages like Spanish
). Another similarity among creoles is that questions are created simply by changing a declarative sentence's intonation
, not its word order or content.
However, extensive work by Carla Hudson-Kam and Elissa Newport suggests that creole languages may not support a universal grammar, as has sometimes been supposed. In a series of experiments, Hudson-Kam and Newport looked at how children and adults learn artificial grammars. Notably, they found that children tend to ignore minor variations in the input when those variations are infrequent, and reproduce only the most frequent forms. In doing so, they tend to standardize the language that they hear around them. Hudson-Kam and Newport hypothesize that in a pidgin situation (and in the real life situation of a deaf child whose parents were disfluent signers), children are systematizing the language they hear based on the probability and frequency of forms, and not, as has been suggested on the basis of a universal grammar. Further, it seems unsurprising that creoles would share features with the languages they are derived from and thus look similar "grammatically."
Geoffrey Sampson
maintains that universal grammar theories are not falsifiable and are therefore pseudoscientific theory
. He argues that the grammatical "rules" linguists posit are simply post-hoc observations about existing languages, rather than predictions about what is possible in a language. Similarly, Jeffrey Elman
argues that the unlearnability of languages assumed by Universal Grammar is based on a too-strict, "worst-case" model of grammar, that is not in keeping with any actual grammar. In keeping with these points, James Hurford argues that the postulate of a language acquisition device
(LAD) essentially amounts to the trivial claim that languages are learnt by humans, and thus, that the LAD is less a theory than an explanandum
looking for theories.
Sampson, Roediger, Elman and Hurford are hardly alone in suggesting that several of the basic assumptions of Universal Grammar are unfounded. Indeed, a growing number of language acquisition researchers argue that the very idea of a strict rule-based grammar in any language flies in the face of what is known about how languages are spoken and how languages evolve over time. For instance, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater have argued that the relatively fast-changing nature of language would prevent the slower-changing genetic structures from ever catching up, undermining the possibility of a genetically hard-wired universal grammar. In addition, it has been suggested that people learn about probabilistic patterns of word distributions in their language, rather than hard and fast rules (see the distributional hypothesis
). It has also been proposed that the poverty of the stimulus
problem can be largely avoided, if we assume that children employ similarity-based generalization strategies in language learning, generalizing about the usage of new words from similar words that they already know how to use.
Another way of defusing the poverty of the stimulus
argument is to assume that if language learners notice the absence of classes of expressions in the input, they will hypothesize a restriction (a solution closely related to Bayesian reasoning
). In a similar vein, language acquisition
researcher
Michael Ramscar has suggested that when children erroneously expect an ungrammatical form that then never occurs, the repeated failure of expectation serves as a form of implicit negative feedback
that allows them to correct their errors over time. This implies that word learning is a probabilistic, error-driven process, rather than a process of fast mapping
, as many nativists assume.
Finally, in the domain of field research, the Pirahã language
is claimed to be a counterexample to the basic tenets of Universal Grammar. Among other things, this language is alleged to lack all evidence for recursion
, including embedded clauses
, as well as quantifiers and color
terms. Some other linguists have argued, however, that some of these properties have been misanalyzed, and that others are actually expected under current theories of Universal Grammar. While most languages studied in that respect do indeed seem to share common underlying rules, research is hampered by considerable sampling bias. Linguistically, most diverse areas such as tropical Africa
and America
, as well as the diversity of Indigenous Australian and Papuan languages
, have been insufficiently studied. Furthermore, language extinction has disproportionately affected some areas.
X, it will also have the feature Y." Rules that are widely considered as part of UG include:
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.
Usually credited to Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar
Grammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
are hard-wired into the brain
Psychological nativism
In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to empiricism, the 'blank slate' or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but...
, and manifest themselves without being taught
Poverty of the stimulus
In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus is the assertion that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity...
. There is still much argument whether there is such a thing and what it would be.
Argument
If human beings growing up under normal conditions (not conditions of extreme deprivation) always develop a language with property X (for example, distinguishing nounNoun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
s from verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
s, or distinguishing function word
Function word
Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker...
s from lexical words) then property X is a property of universal grammar in this most general sense (here not capitalized).
There are theoretical senses of the term Universal Grammar as well (here capitalized). The most general of these would be that Universal Grammar is whatever properties of a normally developing human brain cause it to learn languages that conform to universal grammar (the non-capitalized, pretheoretical sense). Using the above examples, Universal Grammar would be the property that the brain has that causes it to posit a difference between nouns and verbs whenever presented with linguistic data..
As Chomsky puts it, "Evidently, development of language in the individual must involve three factors: (1) genetic endowment, which sets limits on the attainable languages, thereby making language acquisition possible; (2) external
data, converted to the experience that selects one or another language within a narrow range; (3) principles
not specific to FL." [FL is the faculty of language, whatever properties of the brain cause it to learn language.] So (1) is Universal Grammar in the first theoretical sense, (2) is the linguistic data which the child is exposed to.
Sometimes aspects of Universal Grammar in this sense seem to be describable in terms of general facts about cognition.
For example, if a predisposition to categorize events and objects as different classes of things is part of human cognition, and as a direct result nouns and verbs show up in all languages, then it could be said that this aspect of Universal Grammar is not specific to language, but is part of cognition more generally. To distinguish properties of languages that can be traced to other facts about cognition from properties of languages that cannot, the abbreviation UG* can be used. UG is the term often used by Chomsky for those aspects of the human brain which cause language to be the way it is (i.e. are Universal Grammar in the sense used here) but here for discussion it is used for those aspects which are furthermore specific to language (thus UG, as Chomsky uses it, is just an abbreviation for Universal Grammar, but UG* as used here is a subset of Universal Grammar).
In the same article, Chomsky casts the theme of a larger research program in terms of the following question: "How little can be attributed to UG while still accounting for the variety of I-languages attained, relying on third factor principles?" (I-languages meaning internal languages, the brain states that correspond to knowing how to speak and understand a particular language, and third factor principles meaning (3) in the previous quote).
Chomsky has speculated that UG might be extremely simple and abstract, for example only a mechanism for combining symbols in a particular way, which he calls Merge. To see that Chomsky does not use the term "UG" in the narrow sense UG* suggested above, consider the following quote from the same article:
"The conclusion that Merge falls within UG holds whether such recursive generation is unique to FL or is
appropriated from other systems."
I.e. Merge is part of UG because it causes language to be the way it is, is universal, and is not part of (2) (the environment) or (3) (general properties independent of genetics and environment). Merge is part of Universal Grammar whether it is specific to language or whether, as Chomsky suggests, it is also used for example in mathematical thinking.
The distinction is important because there is a long history of argument about UG*, whereas most people working on language agree that there is Universal Grammar. Many people assume that Chomsky means UG* when he writes UG (and in some cases he might actually mean UG*, though not in the passage quoted above).
Some students of universal grammar study a variety of grammars to abstract generalizations called linguistic universal
Linguistic universal
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of...
s, often in the form of "If X holds true, then Y occurs." These have been extended to a variety of traits, such as the phonemes found in languages, what word orders languages choose, and why children exhibit certain linguistic behaviors.
The idea can be traced to Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. , also known as Doctor Mirabilis , was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods...
's observation that all languages are built upon a common grammar, substantially the same in all languages, even though it may undergo in them accidental variations, and the 13th century speculative grammarians who, following Bacon, postulated universal rules underlying all grammars. The concept of a universal grammar or language was at the core of the 17th century projects for philosophical language
Philosophical language
A philosophical language is any constructed language that is constructed from first principles, like a logical language, but may entail a strong claim of absolute perfection or transcendent or even mystical truth rather than satisfaction of pragmatic goals...
s. The 18th century in Scotland saw the emergence of a vigorous universal grammar school. Later linguists who have influenced this theory include Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
and Richard Montague
Richard Montague
Richard Merett Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher.-Career:At the University of California, Berkeley, Montague earned an B.A. in Philosophy in 1950, an M.A. in Mathematics in 1953, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy 1957, the latter under the direction of the mathematician and logician...
, developing their version of the theory as they considered issues of the Argument from poverty of the stimulus to arise from the constructivist approach to linguistic theory. The application of the idea to the area of second language acquisition (SLA) is represented mainly by the McGill linguist Lydia White
Lydia White
Lydia White is a researcher and educator in the area of second language acquisition . She is James McGill Professor of Linguistics and currently Chair of the Department of Linguistics at McGill University....
.
Most syntacticians generally concede that there are parametric points of variation between languages, although heated debate occurs over whether UG constraints are essentially universal due to being "hard-wired" (Chomsky's Principles and Parameters
Principles and parameters
Principles and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles and specific parameters that for particular languages are either turned on or off...
approach), a logical consequence of a specific syntactic architecture (the Generalized Phrase Structure approach) or the result of functional constraints on communication (the functionalist approach).
History
During the early 20th century, language was usually understood from a behaviourist perspective, suggesting 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.The idea can be traced to Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. , also known as Doctor Mirabilis , was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods...
's observation that all languages are built upon a common grammar, substantially the same in all languages, even though it may undergo accidental variations, and the 13th century speculative grammarians who, following Bacon, postulated universal rules underlying all grammars. The concept of a universal grammar or language was at the core of the 17th century projects for philosophical language
Philosophical language
A philosophical language is any constructed language that is constructed from first principles, like a logical language, but may entail a strong claim of absolute perfection or transcendent or even mystical truth rather than satisfaction of pragmatic goals...
s. There is a Scottish school of universal grammarians from the 18th century, to be distinguished from the philosophical language project, and including authors such as James Beattie
James Beattie
James Beattie may refer to:*James Beattie *James Beattie , English footballer*Jim Beattie , baseball player*Jim Beattie , Scottish rock musician-See also:...
, Hugh Blair
Hugh Blair
Hugh Blair FRSE was a Scottish minister of religion, author and rhetorician, considered one of the first great theorists of written discourse....
, James Burnett, James Harris
James Harris (grammarian)
James Harris, FRS was an English politician and grammarian.-Life and works:He was born at Salisbury and educated at the grammar school in the Close at Salisbury, and at Wadham College, Oxford. On leaving the university he was entered at Lincoln's Inn as a student of law, though not intended for...
, and Adam Smith
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
. The article on "Grammar" in the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
(1771) contains an extensive section titled "Of Universal Grammar."
The idea rose to notability in modern linguistics with theorists such as Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
and Richard Montague
Richard Montague
Richard Merett Montague was an American mathematician and philosopher.-Career:At the University of California, Berkeley, Montague earned an B.A. in Philosophy in 1950, an M.A. in Mathematics in 1953, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy 1957, the latter under the direction of the mathematician and logician...
, developed in the 1950s to 1970s, as part of the "Linguistics Wars
Linguistics Wars
Linguistics Wars is a colloquial term for a protracted academic dispute in American generative linguistics which took place mostly in the 1960s and 1970s....
".
Chomsky's theory
LinguistLinguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
made the argument
Argument
In philosophy and logic, an argument is an attempt to persuade someone of something, or give evidence or reasons for accepting a particular conclusion.Argument may also refer to:-Mathematics and computer science:...
that the human brain
Human brain
The human brain has the same general structure as the brains of other mammals, but is over three times larger than the brain of a typical mammal with an equivalent body size. Estimates for the number of neurons in the human brain range from 80 to 120 billion...
contains a limited set of rules for organizing language. In turn, there is an assumption that all languages have a common structural basis. This set of rules is known as universal grammar.
Speakers proficient in a language know what expressions are acceptable in their language and what expressions are unacceptable. The key puzzle is how speakers should come to know the restrictions of their language, since expressions which violate those restrictions are not present in the input, indicated as such. This absence of negative evidence—that is, absence of evidence that an expression is part of a class of the ungrammatical sentences in one's language—is the core of the poverty of stimulus argument. For example, in English one cannot relate a question word like 'what' to a predicate within a relative clause (1):
(1) *What did John meet a man who sold?
Such expressions are not available to the language learners, because they are, by hypothesis, ungrammatical for speakers of the local language. Speakers of the local language do not utter such expressions and note that they are unacceptable to language learners. Universal grammar offers a solution to the poverty of the stimulus problem by making certain restrictions universal characteristics of human languages. Language learners are consequently never tempted to generalize in an illicit fashion.
Presence of creole languages
The presence of creole languageCreole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
s is sometimes cited as further support for this theory, especially by Bickerton's
Derek Bickerton
Derek Bickerton is a linguist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Based on his work in creole languages in Guyana and Hawaii, he has proposed that the features of creole languages provide powerful insights into the development of language both by individuals and as a...
controversial language bioprogram theory
Language bioprogram theory
The language bioprogram theory or language bioprogram hypothesis is a theory arguing that the structural similarities between different creole languages cannot be solely attributed to their superstrate and substrate languages...
. Creoles are languages that are developed and formed when different societies come together and are forced to devise their own system of communication. The system used by the original speakers is typically an inconsistent mix of vocabulary items known as a pidgin
Pidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
. As these speakers' children begin to acquire their first language, they use the pidgin input to effectively create their own original language, known as a creole
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
. Unlike pidgins, creoles have native speaker
Native Speaker
Native Speaker is Chang-Rae Lee’s first novel. In Native Speaker, he creates a man named Henry Park who tries to assimilate into American society and become a “native speaker.”-Plot summary:...
s and make use of a full grammar.
According to Bickerton, the idea of universal grammar is supported by creole languages because certain features are shared by virtually all of these languages. For example, their default point of reference in time (expressed by bare verb stems) is not the present moment, but the past. Using pre-verbal auxiliaries
Auxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
, they uniformly express tense
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
, aspect
Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
, and mood
Grammatical mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
. Negative concord occurs, but it affects the verbal subject (as opposed to the object, as it does in languages like Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
). Another similarity among creoles is that questions are created simply by changing a declarative sentence's intonation
Intonation
Intonation may refer to:*Intonation , the variation of tone used when speaking*Intonation , a musician's realization of pitch accuracy, or the pitch accuracy of a musical instrument*Intonation Music Festival, held in Chicago...
, not its word order or content.
However, extensive work by Carla Hudson-Kam and Elissa Newport suggests that creole languages may not support a universal grammar, as has sometimes been supposed. In a series of experiments, Hudson-Kam and Newport looked at how children and adults learn artificial grammars. Notably, they found that children tend to ignore minor variations in the input when those variations are infrequent, and reproduce only the most frequent forms. In doing so, they tend to standardize the language that they hear around them. Hudson-Kam and Newport hypothesize that in a pidgin situation (and in the real life situation of a deaf child whose parents were disfluent signers), children are systematizing the language they hear based on the probability and frequency of forms, and not, as has been suggested on the basis of a universal grammar. Further, it seems unsurprising that creoles would share features with the languages they are derived from and thus look similar "grammatically."
Criticism
Since their inception, universal grammar theories have been subjected to vocal and sustained criticism. In recent years, with the advent of more sophisticated brands of computational modeling and more innovative approaches to the study of language acquisition, these criticisms have multiplied.Geoffrey Sampson
Geoffrey Sampson
Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex....
maintains that universal grammar theories are not falsifiable and are therefore pseudoscientific theory
Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
. He argues that the grammatical "rules" linguists posit are simply post-hoc observations about existing languages, rather than predictions about what is possible in a language. Similarly, Jeffrey Elman
Jeffrey Elman
Jeffrey L. Elman is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a well-known psycholinguist and pioneer in the field of neural networks.-Biography:...
argues that the unlearnability of languages assumed by Universal Grammar is based on a too-strict, "worst-case" model of grammar, that is not in keeping with any actual grammar. In keeping with these points, James Hurford argues that the postulate of a language acquisition device
Language acquisition device
The Language Acquisition Device is a postulated "organ" of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic language . First proposed by Noam Chomsky, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is...
(LAD) essentially amounts to the trivial claim that languages are learnt by humans, and thus, that the LAD is less a theory than an explanandum
Explanandum
An explanandum is a phenomenon that needs to be explained and its explanans is the explanation of that phenomenon. For example, one person may pose an explanandum by asking "Why is there smoke?", and another may provide an explanans by responding "Because there is a fire"...
looking for theories.
Sampson, Roediger, Elman and Hurford are hardly alone in suggesting that several of the basic assumptions of Universal Grammar are unfounded. Indeed, a growing number of language acquisition researchers argue that the very idea of a strict rule-based grammar in any language flies in the face of what is known about how languages are spoken and how languages evolve over time. For instance, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater have argued that the relatively fast-changing nature of language would prevent the slower-changing genetic structures from ever catching up, undermining the possibility of a genetically hard-wired universal grammar. In addition, it has been suggested that people learn about probabilistic patterns of word distributions in their language, rather than hard and fast rules (see the distributional hypothesis
Distributional hypothesis
The Distributional Hypothesis in linguistics is the theory that words that occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was popularized by Firth. The Distributional Hypothesis is the basis for Statistical...
). It has also been proposed that the poverty of the stimulus
Poverty of the stimulus
In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus is the assertion that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity...
problem can be largely avoided, if we assume that children employ similarity-based generalization strategies in language learning, generalizing about the usage of new words from similar words that they already know how to use.
Another way of defusing the poverty of the stimulus
Poverty of the stimulus
In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus is the assertion that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity...
argument is to assume that if language learners notice the absence of classes of expressions in the input, they will hypothesize a restriction (a solution closely related to Bayesian reasoning
Bayesian inference
In statistics, Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference. It is often used in science and engineering to determine model parameters, make predictions about unknown variables, and to perform model selection...
). In a similar vein, language acquisition
Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...
researcher
Researcher
A researcher is somebody who performs research, the search for knowledge or in general any systematic investigation to establish facts. Researchers can work in academic, industrial, government, or private institutions.-Examples of research institutions:...
Michael Ramscar has suggested that when children erroneously expect an ungrammatical form that then never occurs, the repeated failure of expectation serves as a form of implicit negative feedback
Negative feedback
Negative feedback occurs when the output of a system acts to oppose changes to the input of the system, with the result that the changes are attenuated. If the overall feedback of the system is negative, then the system will tend to be stable.- Overview :...
that allows them to correct their errors over time. This implies that word learning is a probabilistic, error-driven process, rather than a process of fast mapping
Fast mapping
In cognitive psychology, fast mapping is a hypothesized mental process whereby a new concept can be learned based only on a single exposure to a given unit of information...
, as many nativists assume.
Finally, in the domain of field research, the Pirahã language
Pirahã language
Pirahã is a language spoken by the Pirahã. The Pirahã are an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, living along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon....
is claimed to be a counterexample to the basic tenets of Universal Grammar. Among other things, this language is alleged to lack all evidence for recursion
Recursion
Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. For instance, when the surfaces of two mirrors are exactly parallel with each other the nested images that occur are a form of infinite recursion. The term has a variety of meanings specific to a variety of disciplines ranging from...
, including embedded clauses
Dependent clause
In linguistics, a dependent clause is a clause that augments an independent clause with additional information, but which cannot stand alone as a sentence. Dependent clauses modify the independent clause of a sentence or serve as a component of it...
, as well as quantifiers and color
Color
Color or colour is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, green, blue and others. Color derives from the spectrum of light interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors...
terms. Some other linguists have argued, however, that some of these properties have been misanalyzed, and that others are actually expected under current theories of Universal Grammar. While most languages studied in that respect do indeed seem to share common underlying rules, research is hampered by considerable sampling bias. Linguistically, most diverse areas such as tropical Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
and America
Americas
The Americas, or America , are lands in the Western hemisphere, also known as the New World. In English, the plural form the Americas is often used to refer to the landmasses of North America and South America with their associated islands and regions, while the singular form America is primarily...
, as well as the diversity of Indigenous Australian and Papuan languages
Papuan languages
The Papuan languages are those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. The term does not presuppose a genetic relationship. The concept of Papuan peoples as distinct from Melanesians was first suggested and named by Sidney Herbert Ray in 1892.-The...
, have been insufficiently studied. Furthermore, language extinction has disproportionately affected some areas.
Examples
Universal Grammar is made up of a set of rules that apply to most or all natural human languages. Most of these rules come in the form of "if a language has a featureFeature (linguistics)
A feature is a concept applied to several fields of linguistics, typically involving the assignment of binary or unary conditions which act as constraints.-In phonology:...
X, it will also have the feature Y." Rules that are widely considered as part of UG include:
- If a language is head-initial (like English), it will have prepositional phrases; if and only if it is head-final (like Japanese) will it have post-positional phrases.
- If a language has a word for purple, it will have a word for red.
See also
- Applicative Universal GrammarApplicative Universal GrammarApplicative Universal Grammar, or AUG, is a universal semantic metalanguage intended for studying the semantic processes in particular languages....
- Broca's areaBroca's areaBroca's area is a region of the hominid brain with functions linked to speech production.The production of language has been linked to the Broca’s area since Pierre Paul Broca reported impairments in two patients. They had lost the ability to speak after injury to the posterior inferior frontal...
- LanguageLanguageLanguage may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
- Native Language
- Optimality TheoryOptimality theoryOptimality theory is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the interaction between conflicting constraints. OT models grammars as systems that provide mappings from inputs to outputs; typically, the inputs are conceived of as underlying representations, and...
- Origin of languageOrigin of languageThe origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
- Principles and parametersPrinciples and parametersPrinciples and parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles and specific parameters that for particular languages are either turned on or off...
- Psychological nativismPsychological nativismIn the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to empiricism, the 'blank slate' or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but...
- Sarkar's Linguistic Concepts and Criteria
- Universal Networking LanguageUniversal Networking LanguageUniversal Networking Language is a declarative formal language specifically designed to represent semantic data extracted from natural language texts...