Universal Grammar
Universal grammar is a theory in linguistic that suggest that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.
The goal of the linguist is to determine what it is that native speakers know about their native language which enables them to speak and understand the language, and how this linguistic knowledge might be represented in the mind/brain: hence,
in studying language, we are studying a specific kind of cognition (i.e. human
knowledge).In work in the 1960s, Chomsky drew a distinction between competence (the
native speaker’s tacit knowledge of his or her language) and performance (what
people actually say or understand by what some one else says on a given occasion). a theory of universal grammar must provide with the tool needed to provide a descriptively adequate grammar for any and every human I-language.
1.2 The Language Faculty
An acquisition theory is concerned with the question of how children acquire grammars of their native language. Children generally produce their first word by around the age of twelve months. For the next six months, they development their speech production. At around the age of eighteen months children start to make productive use of inflections and similarly start to produce elementary two-and three-word utterance. And by the age of around thirty months, they acquired a wide variety of the inflections and core grammatical constructions and are able to produce adult-like sentences.
Chomsky maintains that the most plausible explanation for the uniformity and rapidity of first language acquisition is to posit that the course of acquisition is determined by a biologically endowed innate faculty of language/FL. The acquisition process can be presented schematically:
However, Chomsky notes that some properties of human language may reflect principle of biology more generally, and perhaps even more fundamental principle about the natural world. Accordingly: development of language in individual must involve three factors: 1). genetic endowment, which sets limit 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.
1.3 Principles of Universal Grammar
Principles of universal grammar
Children can in principle acquire any natural language as their native language
The language faculty must incorporate a theory of Universal Grammar/UG which enables the child to develop a grammar of any natural language on the basis of suitable linguistic experience of language. We can uncover the principles is that since the relevant principles are posited to be universal, it follows that they will affect the application of every relevant type of grammatical operation in every language. Thus, detailed analysis of one grammatical construction in one language could reveal of evidence of the operation of principles of UG.
There is question-formation in englisg which is called an echo question and a non-echo question. It happens because of The movement operations (auxiliary inversion and wh-movement).
The movement operations are subject to the same locality condition suggests that one of the principles of UG incorporated into the language faculty is called Locality Principle. Since Ug principles which are innately endowed are wired into the language faculty and so do not have to be learned by the child, this minimises the learning load placed on the child, and thereby maximises the learnabilityof natural language grammars.
1.4 Parameters
Language acquisition involves not only lexical learning but also some grammatical learning. The obvious way to determine just what aspects of the grammar of their native language children have to learn is to examine the range of parametric variation found in the grammars of different (adult) natural language. We can describe the differences between the two types of language by saying that Italian is a null-subject language, whereas English is a non null subject language. Thus, another of variation between languages is the wh-parameter, a parameter which determines whether wh-expressions are fronted. (i.e. moved to the front of the overall interrogative structure containing them) or not. Wh movement (i.e. movement of wh-expression to the front of the sentences). In formal terms, we can say that English is a head first language, whereas Korean is a head last language.
1.5 Parameter-setting
The theory of parameters outlined in the previous section has important implications for a theory of language acquisition.
The acquisition of grammar involves the twin tasks of lexical learning and structural learning with the latter involving parameter setting. There are two types of evidence (positive and negative evidence). We concluded that the acquisition of grammar involves the twins tasks of lexical learning and parameter setting,. We went on to ask what kind of evidence children use in parameters, and concluded that they use positive evidence from their experience of the occurrence of specific types of structure.