Universal Grammar
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C3P60
2025-12-02
67
Universal Grammar
The Universal Grammar hypothesis was proposed by Chomsky, and represents an attempt to explain not only why linguistic universals exist, but also how children come to acquire the language(s) they are exposed to so rapidly. The Universal Grammar hypothesis goes hand in hand with the nativist hypothesis, which holds that the principles of Universal Grammar are innate rather than learned (see Chapter 4). However, Chomsky does not claim that children are born with a fully specified grammar. Children still have to go through the process of acquiring the grammar of the language(s) they are exposed to. Instead, what is claimed to be universal and innate is the pre-specification, which we can think of as a kind of ‘blueprint’ that guides what is possible. Chomsky (1965) presented this pre-specification in terms of what he called formal and substantive universals. Substantive universals are grammatical categories like noun and verb, and grammatical functions like subject and object: what we might think of as the basic ‘building blocks’ of grammar. Chomsky (1965: 66) suggests that languages select from a universal set of these substantive categories. Formal universals are rules like phrase structure rules, which determine how phrases and sentences can be built up from words, and derivational rules, which guide the reorganisation of syntactic structures, allowing certain kinds of sentences to be trans formed into or derived from other kinds of sentences (for example, the transformation of a declarative sentence into an interrogative sentence). In the 1980s, Chomsky developed a more flexible approach to Universal Grammar, called the Principles and Parameters approach. According to this model, the innate pre-specification for language is captured in terms of a limited set of principles that can vary according to a small set of parameters of variation. These parameters are ‘set’ on the basis of the properties of language an individual is exposed to during childhood. For example, given sufficient exposure to spoken language, a child’s grammatical system will set the ‘head initial/final parameter’ at ‘initial’ for languages like English where verbs precede their objects, but will set this parameter at ‘final’ for languages like Korean, where verbs follow their objects. The most recent version of Chomsky’s theory, the Minimalist Program, also adopts a version of this approach.
Cognitive linguists (and typologists) argue that the fundamental problem with Chomsky’s hypothesis is that cross-linguistic comparison reveals there to be little evidence for substantive universals of the kind he assumes. In other words, some typologists argue that categories like adjective or grammatical functions like subject and object are not found in all languages (see Croft 2003: 183–8, for example). Cognitive linguists, among linguists of other theoretical persuasions, also argue that the formal theories of phrase structure proposed by Chomsky in order to account for formal universals are unnecessarily abstract, to the extent that parallels across languages are difficult to ascertain. According to Levinson (1996a: 134) ‘it is probably fair to say that the proposals [of Chomsky] need to be taken with a pinch of salt – they are working hypotheses under constant, often drastic, revision.’ Indeed, Chomsky himself defines the Minimalist Program as a research programme rather than a fully developed theory, and acknowledges that generative grammar is undergoing constant change.
It is important to point out at this point that Universal Grammar is adopted as a working hypothesis by a number of generatively oriented theories of language that depart from Chomsky’s transformational approach and adopt a strictly ‘monostratal’ or non-derivational approach. These theories include Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (see Borsley 1996, 1999) and Lexical Functional Grammar (see Bresnan 2001). Formal syntacticians view the quest for Universal Grammar as a worthwhile pursuit, not only because it is a hypothesis worth exploring in its own right, whether it turns out to be correct or not, but also because it provides tools that enable precise and careful descriptions of the world’s languages as well as close comparisons of languages, both related and unrelated.
For cognitive linguists, the picture of language that emerges from such an approach is artificially narrow, focusing as it does upon morphosyntax (word and sentence structure) and having relatively little to say about linguistic meaning or the communicative functions of language.
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