Chomsky’s Universal Grammar

Abstract:Chomsky is a challenging figure in the 20th century. He raised the Universal Grammar.He thinks that language is a mirror of mind. He describes language as a property of human kind and to explain how it is acquired. He differentiated internal language and external language. Chomsky gave the idea of Language Acquisition Device (LAD), Full Interpretation, case theory and government.

Key words:Chomsky Universal Grammar

As one of the 20th century’s most challenging figures, Chomsky is both a linguist and a social reformer. Born in 1928, he studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. He has shown that there is only one human language: that the immense complexity of the innumerable languages we hear around us must be variations on a single theme. He has revolutionized linguistics, and resurrected the theory of innate ideas, demonstrating that a substantial part of our knowledge is genetically determined; he has reinstated rationalist ideas; and he has provided evidence that “unconscious knowledge” is what underlies our ability to speak and understand.

He thinks that language is a mirror of mind in the traditional phrase. He claims that linguistics is scientific in the more interesting sense that it can provide not only explicit descriptions but also explanations for the classification. The first is that it can provide a general theory explaining why languages are the way they are: each language is a particular example of a universal faculty of mind. Whose basic properties are innate. The second is that the theory should spawn testable hypothesis: like a physicist or a biologist, the linguist manipulates the environment experimentally to see what happens. Humans are complex. We have internal structure, and the mind is one part of that structure. The mind works in such a way that different tasks are processed by different mechanisms. The mind is modular, sight and smell, taste and touch, language and memory, are all distinct from each other.

The goals of the universal grammar are to describe language as a property of human kind and to explain how it is acquired. All human beings share part of their knowledge of language; UG is their common possession regardless of which language they speak. Chomsky distinguishes Externalized language from Internalized language. E-language aims to collect samples of language and then to describe their properties. It constructs a grammar to describe the regularities found in sample. I-language is concerned with what a speaker knows about language and where this knowledge comes from; it treats language as an internal property of human mind. Chomsky claims that the history shows a move from an E-language to an I-language approach. I-language research aims to represent this mental state; a grammar describes the speaker’s knowledge of the language rather than the sentences they produce.

Chomsky gave the idea of Language Acquisition Device (LAD).He thinks that children hear a number of sentences said by other people, which are the primary linguistic data; they acquire linguistic competence through the LAD. We can deduce what is gong on inside the child’s LAD by careful examination and the comparison.

LAD led to a way of putting the goals of linguistics in terms of three levels of adequacy. First is the observational adequacy: a theory is observational adequate if it can deal with the basic facts observed in samples of language, which is the input to the LAD. The second is the descriptive level: a theory achieves descriptive adequacy if it deals properly with the linguistic competence of the speaker, which is the generative grammar from the LAD. The third is the explanatory adequacy: a theory is explanatory adequate if the linguistic theory can explain the links between linguistic competence and the linguistic data.

Phrase structure is a simple system derived from a phrase a few principles and the setting of certain parameters. The form phrase structure employed is X-bar syntax. The emphasis is on the general principles of UG. It is distinctive in that it claims that every phrase conforms to a certain requirements. It insists that phrases must be endocentric: a phrase always contains at least a head as well as other possible constituents.

Chomsky proposed a principle called Full Interpretation (FI), which states that every element that appears in structure must be interpreted in some way. He also notes that the underlying point of FI is that language structures must be economical as possible. This is the principle of economy. On these bases, he raised the theory of θ- theory. The term θ-criterion is used to refer to phenomena that are better captured by principles of FI. The θ- theory concerns the process of how θ-roles get from the lexical entry of a predicate to the arguments that bear them. θ-roles are transferred from a predicate to its arguments by a process called θ-marking.

Case theory is related to the traditional syntactic ideas of case, which saw the relationship between elements in a sentence as being shown by their morphology as well as by word order. It deals not just with the case forms visible in the surface but with abstract case, which is an important element in the syntax even when it does not appear in the surface. Case theory is module that assigns abstract to NPs and, by doing so, provides a principled explanation for various movement.

The last is the government. First let’s see C-Command, α c-commands β if α does not dominate β and every γ that dominates α also dominates β. Government is a version of c-command, with two types of restrictions. Firstly, any element can c-command another, the ability to govern is restricted to a limited number of governors, the set of lexical heads, though there are a number of exceptions. Secondly, government is restricted compared to c-command in that it is limited form the bottom as well as the top.

General grammar is a center of Chomsky’s theory. He overturned the dominant school of behaviorism in psychology, and has returned the mind into its position of preeminence in the study of humankind. General grammar has a history of 45 years and covers philosophy, psychology and many other fields in the theory of linguistics. It influenced other linguists deeply.

Reference:

[1]Cook,Vivian. Chomsky’s Universal Grammar. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1988.

[2]Smith, Neil. Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.