12/17/2023 0 Comments Universal grammar by noam chomsky![]() ![]() ![]() The whole sentence "Noam wrote a book" would be contained in a top-layer verbal phrase (VP or V''), consisting of a specifier noun phrase (NP) and the lower verb node (V'). The first layer of nodes (XP or X'') consists of a specifier and a lower node (X') this node consists of a head (X) and its complements, which can be other phrases. ![]() X-bar is made up of two-layer nodes of two types: lexical (centered around actual words) and functional (which can rearrange words, change tense and number, etc.). Let's see how that looks in X-bar (though without the useful diagrams). It's probably best to just give a simple explanation of how this analysis would be used perhaps our example sentence could be "Noam wrote a book." In traditional English grammar, we would say the sentence consists of a subject noun ("Noam"), a verb ("wrote"), and an object noun ("book"), with an article ("a"). There are also two layers of X-bar syntax: the deep structure (d-structure), keeping to the fundamental rules of Universal Grammar, and the surface structure (s-structure), which rearranges elements of the sentence to resemblance the actual speech of a certain language. This mainly makes use of what is called "X-bar syntax," a hierarchical concept typically shown as tree diagrams which explain the underlying grammar as a structure of nodes. Most of the text is taken up with an ever more complex discussion of the Chomskyian understanding of the Universal Grammar itself, in all its principles and structures. This more general idea and what it means for the process of language acquisition is only the entryway to the book, though. For instance, the lexical entries of "die" and "kill" would state that they are, respectively, intransitive and transitive: the first cannot take an object (or "patient"), while the second one can and, in most cases, must. For Chomskyian grammar, the definition of a word (the "lexical entry") includes much more than simple definition: it includes information about how a word is used within grammatical structures. ![]() It means that, when someone learns a language, they are really learning two main things: 1) the parameters that change certain rules and structures and 2) the vocabulary, or, more properly, the lexicon. The more general aspect of Universal Grammar-that the underlying grammatical structure of language is innate, not learned-can be somewhat interesting for the non-specialist. For instance, in Spanish, one can simply say "Hablaron" to mean "They spoke," without needing to declare the subject "ustedes," since the conjugation of the verb declares the person and number (3rd person plural) of the implied subject, so it is a pro-drop language in English, though, we can't simply say "spoke" without a subject, so it is a non-pro-drop language.) (One example of such a parameter is "pro-drop," that is, whether a language requires an explicitly declared subject. This concept of Universal Grammar is described as "principles and parameters" theory: the principles of Universal Grammar, in its deeper structural aspects, are hardwired and the same for every language, while the parameters, which change the surface level of the language, are changeable, often viewed as an on-off switch. Instead, encounters with a particular language teach someone certain parameters of the language-informally, we might think of how subjects, verbs, and objects are ordered, though the Chomskyian understanding of these concepts involves much more complex structures. Regarding its innateness, the main argument is "poverty of stimulus": typical encounters with language do not provide nearly enough information to form the complex underlying structure necessary to form novel utterances. (This ability to form novel utterances, based on prior rules and vocabulary, is the key point of "generative grammar.") What is most important is that 1) this Universal Grammar is hardwired and 2) it provides the basis for learning any language. Summarized, it is the idea that a basic grammatical structure and set of rules hardwired into human beings when (typically as children) they encounter language, they unconsciously use this structure to understand the language they encounter and to form new utterances in that language. The concept of Universal Grammar in itself can still be interesting, even without diving into the analytical details. As the title states, it is an introduction to the theory of Universal Grammar-as well as the transformational-generative grammar tied to it-which Noam Chomsky originated in the late 1950s, and which has been expanded on in the decades since, by Chomsky and many other linguists. It should be obvious that this book is only for those interested in linguistics, particularly of a more analytical sort. ![]()
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