Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky.
When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG.
[1] The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages.
[4][5] In day-to-day generative research, the notion that universal grammar exists motivates analyses in terms of general principles.
One notable hypothesis proposed by Hagit Borer holds that the fundamental syntactic operations are universal and that all variation arises from different feature-specifications in the lexicon.
[5][10] In a 2002 paper, Noam Chomsky, Marc Hauser and W. Tecumseh Fitch proposed that universal grammar consists solely of the capacity for hierarchical phrase structure.
"[12] Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch present the three leading hypotheses for how language evolved and brought humans to the point where they have a universal grammar.
Unlike pidgins, creoles have native speakers (those with acquisition from early childhood) and make use of a full, systematic grammar.
Another similarity among creoles can be seen in the fact that questions are created simply by changing the intonation of a declarative sentence, not its word order or content.
[citation needed] Recent work has also suggested that some recurrent neural network architectures are able to learn hierarchical structure without an explicit constraint.
This shows that it may in fact be possible for human infants to acquire natural language syntax without an explicit universal grammar.
[16] The empirical basis of poverty of the stimulus arguments has been challenged by Geoffrey Pullum and others, leading to back-and-forth debate in the language acquisition literature.
[17][18] Language acquisition researcher Michael Ramscar has suggested that when children erroneously expect an ungrammatical form that then never occurs, the repeated failure of expectation serves as a form of implicit negative feedback that allows them to correct their errors over time such as how children correct grammar generalizations like goed to went through repetitive failure.
[21] For example, children overgeneralize the past tense marker "ed" and conjugate irregular verbs as if they were regular, producing forms like goed and eated and correct these deviancies over time.
[22] Neurogeneticists Simon Fisher and Sonja Vernes consider Chomsky's "Universal Grammar" as an example of a romantic simplification of genetics and neuroscience.
[citation needed] In the late 19th and early 20th century, Wilhelm Wundt and Otto Jespersen responded to these earlier arguments, arguing that their view of language was overly influenced by Latin and ignored the breadth of worldwide linguistic variation.
SMT dictates that "Merge will be as simple as possible: it will not modify X or Y or impose any arrangement on them; in particular, it will leave them unordered, an important fact...