universal grammar
Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word universal grammar. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word universal grammar, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say universal grammar in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word universal grammar you have here. The definition of the word universal grammar will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofuniversal grammar, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
English
Noun
universal grammar (plural universal grammars)
- (linguistics) A hypothetical innate abstract system in the human brain that underlies the grammar of all human languages.
- 1988, Andrew Radford, chapter 5, in Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 276:
- At this point, let's gather together various loose ends, and try and paint a
simple picture of the overall model of grammar which we are moving towards.
We might suppose that Universal Grammar makes available a set of category-
neutral pairs of rule-schemas such as those numbered (i) and (ii) in (168–170)
above. The members of each pair of rule-schemas differ only in respect of the
relative ordering of constituents. The task of the child acquiring the grammar
of a particular language is thus to determine which ordering options are
selected in the language he is acquiring. For example, the child has to deter-
mine whether a given language is a head-first language incorporating rule-
schema (168) (i), or a head-last language incorporating schema (168) (ii): in
other words, the child has to ‘setʼ the relevant word-order parameter for Com-
plements, Specifiers, Adjuncts, and so forth. The picture is complicated by the
fact that some languages permit more than one ordering option: for example,
as we have already seen, English selects the head-first and specifier-first orders
as the unmarked option, but also selects the ‘mirror imageʼ orders as a marked option.
Translations
hypothetical system in the brain that underlies the grammar of all languages
|