In other words, his environment determines which language he will use, but he is born with the tools to learn any language effectively. If the basic grammar laws are the same for all languages, a child needs only to follow the particular set of rules that his peers follow in order to understand and produce their native language. In addition, every language has a way to identify gender or show that something happened in the past or present. For example, every language has a way to ask a question or make something negative. This “universal grammar theory” suggests that every language has some of the same laws. (Chomsky 1976) The term principles and parameters theory has, however become more popular in recent years as it conveys that unique central claim of the theory that language knowledge consists of principles universal to all languages and parameters that vary from one language to another. According to Chomsky’s theory, the basic structures of language are already encoded in the human brain at birth. He believed that humans are born with an innate ability to learn languages. The theory was popularized by an American linguist named Noam Chomsky who often focused on the effortless language learning of young children.Ĭhomsky didn’t believe that exposure to a language was enough for a young child to become efficient at understanding and producing a language. In the 1960s, linguists became interested in a new theory about grammar, or the laws of language. Universal grammar (UG) (noun): a theory in linguistics usually credited to Noam Chomsky that suggests that the ability to learn grammar is built into the human brain from birth regardless of language
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