Universal grammar

By the end of this Session, you will be able to:• define Universal Grammar• explain why it is termed Universal Grammar• explain what Universal Grammar consist of• relate Universal Grammar and first language

acquisition

What is a Language?

Language = df. A system that uses some physical sign (sound, gesture, mark) to express meaning.

Universal grammar

• Phonological universals: Consonants, for example, are distinguished also according to the location of their production, that is, after the various organs of the vocal tract. With the help of this detailed information we can now refer to every consonant by its location and manner of articulation; [f], for example, is avoiceless, labiodentals fricative.

Universal grammar

• Syntactic universals: Most existing languages have verbs, nouns, adjectivesand pronouns.

Universal grammar

• Semantic universals: One semantic universal regards our notion of colour. There exist eleven basic colour terms: black, white, red, green, blue, yellow, brown, purple, pink, orange, and grey.

Enter Rules

But what are rules, and how are they represented in the brain?

4 Parts to Language/Grammar

Grammar• Phonology – Rule pertaining to the sound

system• Morphology – Rules governing word

structure. • Syntax – Rules governing the structure of

sentences• Semantics – Rules concerning meaning.

Phonological Rules

Language consists of a fairly small set of sounds (phonemes). There are about 40 in English. Most have no meaning in themselves; rather we string them together to form meaningful bits and pieces.

Rules - E.g., an English word can end, but not begin, with an -ng sound . A BM word can begin and end with an – ng sound.

Morphology

Language is Made up of Morphemes. Many are words (Lexicon is the dictionary of).

“Papers” has 2 morphemes (paper & s)

3 million words in English (about 200,000 words in common use today).

Syntactic Rules

Rules that enable us to combine morphemes into sentences (bridge between sound and meaning).When children put words together they are following syntactic rules about how morphemes are put together.

Semantic

Arbitrariness of the Sign - Sounds of words bear no relationship to meaning (except for onomatopoeia).

In Philosophy we often distinguish between denotation and connotation.

Semantics Follows Syntax

“The people talked over the noise”

Two Syntaxtical Interpretations 1. [The people] [talked [over]the noise]]] - Over is a

preposition 2. [The people [talked over][the noise] – Over is a

particle

Semantics Follows Syntax

A single sentence can correspond to two propositions, each of which has a distinctive syntactic (and logical) structure, hence, a different cognitive representation.

• Evidence that meaning is assigned to syntactic structure, rather than to words and sentences.

Questions About Rules

–How do we come to have such knowledge?

–In what form is such knowledge represented in the mind?

–How can children learn grammar?

Grammar

How do we know that one sentence is grammatical and the other is not?

– Amy likes Stan– Think likes I Stan that Amy

Cannot be that we have learned each instance individually. Sentences are infinite; brain is not.

Interesting Facts About Language

• The number of sentences is infinite. • We are able to distinguish grammatical from

ungrammatical sentences.• We are able to recognize truncated

sentences (“Stop it”) that are missing nouns.• We are able to recognize ambiguous

sentences (“Andrew saw the girl with binoculars”)

• We can create sentences that paraphrase each other.

Noam Chomsky

Focused on the vast and unconscious set of rules he hypothesized must exist in the minds of speakers and hearers in order for them to produce and understand their native language.  

1957 – Syntactic Structures1965 – Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

Chomsky’s Views• He abandons the idea that children produce

languages only by imitation (abandon behaviorism)

• He rejects the idea that direct teaching and correcting of grammar could account for children’s utterances because the rules children were unconsciously acquiring are buried in the unconscious of the adults.

• He claims that there are generative rules (explicit algorithms that characterize the structures of a particular language).

Chomsky’s ViewsHypothesis – The inborn linguistic capacity of humans is sensitive to just those rules that occur in human languages. Language development occurs if the environment provides exposure to language. Similar to the capacity to walk.

 Universal Grammar - Despite superficial differences all human languages share a fundamental structure. This structure is a universal grammar. We have an innate ability to apply this universal grammar to whatever language we are faced with at birth.

Chomsky’s Recent Views (1980s)

Principles and Parameters Formulation– Principles: Govern application of the rules of

language.  – Parameters: There are a finite number of

ways that the principles may apply.

Likens grammar to a set of switches, each having a fixed range of potential settings. Learning the syntax of one’s own language is a matter of setting those switches. Acquiring a language is a matter of fixing the parameters in one of the permissible ways.

Support for Chomsky (1)

• That the number of grammatical sentences is infinite supports the idea that we have to appeal to grammatical rules.

Support for Chomsky (2)

Claim that children can’t be taught grammatical rules because they are not explicitly known. Rather, they absorb these rules unconsciously, as their language is spoken around them.

Support for Innate Rules

Competent speakers of a language don’t know the principles that form grammatical judgments. They never learned these rules in school, nor were they taught them by their parents. Linguistic knowledge is unconscious or tacit.

Language Processing in Babies

Different Languages have different Phonological Distinctions. – Japanese speakers can’t distinguish R and L– Spanish and French speakers divide B and P

differently from English. What sounds like a b to a Spanish speaker will sound like a p to an English speaker.

Scientists thought that babies wouldn’t be able to hear the subtle difference between speech sounds.

Language Processing in Babies

Instead found that they did the reverse. Babies of one month distinguished every English sound contrast as well as adults. American babies could also distinguish sounds found in Spanish. By six months they were starting to lose this ability. By one year it was pretty much gone.

Feral Children• Victor – (early 1800s) The wild boy of Aveyron.

Found in the woods at about 11 or 12. He was probably partially mentally retarded. He never learned to use language.

• Genie – (1970) 13 year old girl had lived whole life in total isolation in her home. She may or may not have been of normal intelligence but never able to acquire language.

• Isabell – Found at 6 (1947). In two months she was combining words. Within a year she had similar language to other 7 year olds.

What is Universal Grammar?

• Universal Grammar (UG) is “the system of principles, conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages”.(Chomsky, 1969)

Why it is named ‘Universal Grammar’?

• Chomsky named this innate capacity as Universal Grammar. ‘Universal’ imply that it isuniversal to all human beings and human languages and ‘grammar’ signify the factsabout grammar (language rules) that humans are born knowing.

What does Universal Grammar consist of?

• Universal Grammar exists in the child’s mind as a system of principles and parameters.The amount of all the principles cover grammar, speech sounds, and meaning thatheredity builds into the human language organ. Principles of Language are rules of thelanguage or abstract principles that permit or prohibit certain structures from occurring inall human languages

What does Universal Grammar consist of?

• Study the following example:• (English) The artist drew an eagle.• (Bahasa Melayu) Pelukis itu melukis seekor

burung helang.• This sentence breaks up into a noun phrase (NP)

“the artist” and verb phrase(VP) “drew an eagle”. These phrases also break up into smaller constituents. The (NP) “the artist” consists of a determiner (Det or D) ‘the’ and a Noun (N) artist, while the NP “an eagle’ consists of a determiner ‘an’ and a Noun ‘eagle’.

What does Universal Grammar consist of?

Sentence NP VP DET N V NP DET N

What does Universal Grammar consist of?

• For example, the us of past tense in English which is non-existent in Bahasa Melayu. Look at the following example:

• i. I went to the market yesterday. English ( change in verb ‘go’ to ‘went’)

• ii. Semalam saya pergi ke pasar. B. Melayu ( no change in verb ‘ pergi’)

UG

• All languages appear to share these universal principles:

• Word order• Subjects & predicates• Nouns & verbs• Negation• Morphological marking tone

UG

• Two most common word orders in the world’s languages

• worder

UG

• We acquire complex grammatical system regardless of how and where we are raised.

• UG would prevent the child from pursuing all sorts of wrong hypothesis abt how lang systems work.

• If children are pre-equipped with UG, then what they have to learn is the ways in which the language they are acquiring makes use of the principle.

UG

• Chomsky’s theory makes crucial use of the fact that UG should be powerful enough to enable the child to acquire a first language and at the same time flexible enough to account for all different human languages.

• This means that his theory is primarily intended as a way of explaining the logical possibility of first language acquisition.

Standing by his principles

• Chomsky (1986) reiterates that UG is part of the human genetic endowment and is coded in the Language Acquisition Faculty(LAF). LAF is an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with presented experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.