Universal Grammar

by Noam Chomsky

Belal Ahmad
21ELMAA129
GI6452
 About the author
 Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist,
philosopher, cognitive scientist, historical essayist,
social critic, and political activist.
 He is often referred as ‘the father of modern
linguistics’.
 He is widely recognized as having helped to spark
the cognitive revolution in the human sciences.
 About the theory

 Human beings possess an inherent quality to

develop language with certain properties.
 This is processed by a genetically determined
language faculty that knows these rules.
  Universal Grammar is a theory of language
acquisition, and part of the innateness
hypothesis.
 Development of Language

 Genetic endowment: which sets limits on the

attainable languages, thereby making language
acquisition possible.
 External data: converted to the experience that
selects one or another language within a narrow
range.
 Principles not specific to the Faculty of Language.
 Chomsky’s theory

 Human brain contains a limited set of

constraints for organizing language.
 All languages have a common structural basis:
the set of rules known as "universal grammar".
 Universal grammar offers an explanation for
the presence of the poverty of the stimulus.
 Deep Structure

 Universal Grammar corresponds to the deep

structure.
 The transformational rules are bound to differ
from language to language.
 Different outputs can correspond to the same
inner structure.