Introduction to Universal Grammar-Chomsky Universal Grammar and Psycholinguistics

Chomsky’s Generative Grammar

Since 1960, a school thought of Linguistics is predominated by (transformational) generative grammar. He thought that a set of grammar rules is generated by a machine. The founding father of generative grammar – Noam Chomsky – is the most important figure in seeing the relation between linguistics and psychology.

The Difference Chomsky with Skinner and the Birth of Psycholinguistics

Skinner stated that humans are like papers, very much influenced by the environment. He ignored humans’ desire; feeling and humans are really steered by the environment. Chomsky and Skinner’s ideas could be received by showing that humans have desire, feelings and ends and they are not like stones. Chomsky assumes that humans are born with innate grammar competence and influenced by nature. He also proposed that an account of verbal behavior requires a specification of what a person must know in order to use a language.

Introduction to Universal Grammar

All languages share a small set of syntactic categories and that these categories can be combined to form phrases whose internal structure includes heads, complements, and specifiers.

Universal Grammar

The system of categories, mechanisms and constraints shared by all human languages is called Universal Grammar (UG). è innate to humans. It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages. The theory does not claim that all human language have the same grammar, but rather, UG proposes a set of rules that would explain how children acquire their languages, or how they construct valid sentences of their language. In short, humans have same devices in the brain to understand and produce language.

Example

• Only nouns and verbs are found in all human languages.
• The adjectives category, while very common, is not universal. In many languages (such as Korean), there are no true adjectives and no direct translations for English sentences.
• Ku  chay-i    caymi   issta.
  that book    interest  exist
  ‘That book is interesting’
  The cat is hungry     OR
• The cat has hunger.
• The cat hungers

Competence and Performance
Chomsky distinguishes 2 aspects of linguistic theory: 1) Universal Grammar (UG), 2) Grammars of particular languages. UG: a set of principles common to all languages; the notion of a ‘possible human language’ and represents innate linguistic knowledge.

• Linguistics is part of theoretical cognitive psychology.
• Linguistic competence: ‘the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language’
• Language faculty: the place where the relatively static knowledge stored.
• Linguistic Performance: ‘the actual use of language in concrete situations’