UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (UG)

Universal Grammar (UG) is a theoretical concept proposed by Noam Chomsky (not without criticism or controversy from scholars in the scientific community) that the human brain contains an innate mental grammar that helps humans acquire language. Chomsky theorized that the brain contains a mechanism he referred to as a language acquisition device (LAD), which is “separate from other faculties of cognitive activity….Input is needed, but only to ‘trigger’ the operation of the language acquisition device” (Ellis 32). Without this LAD, according to Chomsky, children would never be able to learn language from the input they receive.

Nowak et al. summarizes the theory in this way:

“Children acquire their mental grammar spontaneously and without formal training. Children of the same speech community reliably learn the same grammar. Exactly how the mental grammar comes into a child’s mind is a puzzle. Children have to deduce the rules of their native language from sample sentences they receive from their parents and others. This information is insufficient for uniquely determining the underlying grammatical principles (4). Linguists call this phenomenon the “poverty of stimulus” (5) or the “paradox of language acquisition” (6). The proposed solution is universal grammar” (114).

Poverty of stimulus is the ability of the human brain to recognize correct and incorrect grammar even in novel sentences. Vivian Cook writes,

“A second example from English is the well-known pair, ‘John is eager to please’ and ‘John is easy to please’, taken from the earlier ‘Aspects’ model (Chomsky 1965)….Conceivably an adult might explain the difference to the child, or some feature of the particular situation might make it obvious; such accidental and improbable occurrences cannot explain why children go through the same stages in acquiring ‘eager/easy to please’ and are successful at about the same age (Cromer 1970). If the child has not learnt the distinction from the input, he must have done so from some property of his own mind. Both examples therefore exploit the same argument, known as ‘the poverty of the stimulus’, to show that the child knows things about language he could not have learnt from outside, that important aspects of language are not strictly speaking learnable” (“Chomsky’s Universal Grammar”).

History and Background

The concept of a universal grammar (UG) has been traced to the observation of Roger Bacon, a 13th-century Franciscan friar, and philosopher, that all languages are built upon a common grammar. The expression was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s by Chomsky and other linguists.

Components that are considered to be universal include the notion that words can be classified into different groups, such as being nouns or verbs and that sentences follow a particular structure. Sentence structures may be different between languages, but each language has some kind of framework so that speakers can understand each other vs. speaking gibberish. Grammar rules, borrowed words, or idioms of a particular language by definition are not universal grammar.

Challenges and Criticisms

Of course, any theory in an academic setting will have challenges, comments, and criticisms by others in the field; such as it is with peer review and the academic world, where people build on the body of knowledge through writing academic papers and publishing their opinions.

Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison noted in The Economist, "I and many fellow linguists would estimate that we only have a detailed scientific description of something like 10% to 15% of the world's languages, and for 85% we have no real documentation at all. Thus it seems premature to begin constructing grand theories of universal grammar. If we want to understand universals, we must first know the particulars." ("Seven Questions for K. David Harrison." Nov. 23, 2010)

And Jeff Mielke finds some aspects of universal grammar theory to be illogical: "[T]he phonetic motivation for Universal Grammar is extremely weak. Perhaps the most compelling case that can be made is that phonetics, like semantics, is part of the grammar and that there is an implicit assumption that if the syntax is rooted in Universal Grammar, the rest should be too. Most of the evidence for UG is not related to phonology, and phonology has more of a guilt-by-association status with respect to innateness." ("The Emergence of Distinctive Features." Oxford University Press, 2008)

Iain McGilchrist disagrees with Pinkner and took the side of children learning a language just through imitation, which is a behaviorist approach, as opposed to the Chomsky theory of the poverty of the stimulus: 

"[I]t is uncontroversial that the existence of a universal grammar such as Chomsky conceived it is highly debatable. It remains remarkably speculative 50 years after he posited it, and is disputed by many important names in the field of linguistics. And some of the facts are hard to square with it. Languages across the world, it turns out, use a very wide variety of syntax to structure sentences. But more importantly, the theory of universal grammar is not convincingly compatible with the process revealed by developmental psychology, whereby children actually acquire language in the real world. Children certainly evince a remarkable ability to grasp spontaneously the conceptual and psycholinguistic shapes of speech, but they do so in a far more holistic, than analytic, way. They are astonishingly good imitators—note, not copying machines, but imitators." ("The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World." Yale University Press, 2009)