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Tool Module: Chomskys Universal Grammar

During the first half of the 20th century, linguists who theorized about the human ability to speak did so from thebehaviourist 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 Americanlinguist Noam Chomsky. For Chomsky, acquiring language cannotbe reduced to simply developing an inventory of responses tostimuli, because every sentence that anyone produces can be atotally new combination of words. When we speak, we combine afinite number of elementsthe words of our languageto createan infinite number of larger structuressentences.

Moreover, language is governed by a large number of rules andprinciples, particularly those of syntax, which determine the order of words in sentences. The term generative grammarrefers tothe 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 thats how you say it rather thanhow thats you it say, or that the words Boband him cannotmean the same person in the sentence Bob loves him. but cando so in Bob knows that his father loves him. (Note in passingthat generative grammar has nothing to do with grammar textbooks, whose purpose is simply to explain what isgrammatically correct and incorrect in a given language.)

Even before the age of 5, children can, without having had anyformal instruction, consistently produce and interpret sentencesthat they have never encountered before. It is this extraordinaryability to use language despite having had only very partialexposure to the allowable syntactic variants that led Chomsky toformulate his poverty of the stimulus argument, which was the

foundation for the new approach that he proposed in the early1960s.

In Chomskys view, the reason that children so easily master the complex operations of language is that theyhave innate knowledge of certain principles that guide them in developing the grammar of their language. Inother words, Chomskys theory is that language learning is facilitated by a predisposition that our brains havefor certain structures of language.

But what language? For Chomskys theory to hold true, all of the languages in the world must share certainstructural properties. And indeed, Chomsky and other generative linguists like him have shown that the 5000 to6000 languages in the world, despite their very different grammars, do share a set of syntactic rules andprinciples. These linguists believe that this universal grammar is innate and is embedded somewhere in theneuronal circuitry of the human brain. And that would be why children can select, from all the sentences thatcome to their minds, only those that conform to a deep structure encoded in the brains circuits.

Universal grammar

Universal grammar, then, consists of a set of unconscious constraints that let us decide whether a sentence iscorrectly formed. This mental grammar is not necessarily the same for all languages. But according toChomskyian theorists, the process by which, in any given language, certain sentences are perceived as correctwhile 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 thoughwe have a pretty good idea of what it means. Conversely, we recognize that a sentence such as Colorlessgreen 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 anumber 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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