Lecture 3.

Universal Grammar as a scientific theory to explain the origin of language knowledge.

In accord with his revolutionary temperament, N.Chomsky has radically revised traditional doctrines. Chomsky suggests that there are so-called ‘faculties of the mind‘ each of which having its own processing procedures. Chomsky claims that there could be a logical faculty, which consists of a set of logical ideas and that there could be a moral and ethical faculty, with a set of related ideas. Of particular interest to us is the set of ideas that he posits to serve a language function, the language faculty. These language ideas are said by Chomsky to be innate in all human beings, i.e. they are universal, and are the basis on which human grammars are constructed. Virtually an infinite number of grammars (enough to account for any human language) can be constructed from this finite set of ideas. It is this innate set of language ideas that Chomsky refers to as the Language Faculty or Universal Grammar ( UG ) or as it was in the past referred to it as the ‘Language Acquisition Device‘ or LAD.

Chomsky’s UG theory focuses on principles and parameters of phrase structure, principles and parameters of movement of elements within a sentence and the aspect of vocabulary.

Principles and parameters of phrase structure.

N. Chomsky claims that a crucial part of grammar is that sentences have structure: they are built up of phrases nested within phrases. So a sentence such as The boy watched the film is, to use a simplified analysis, made up of a Noun Phrase ‘the film’, within a Verb Phrase, ‘watched the film’, within a sentence having a further Noun Phrase, ‘the boy’, as seen in the tree here.

This tree illustrates something that at first seems obvious, namely that each phrase has a head of a particular type: a Noun Phrase has a head Noun, whether ‘boy or film’, a Verb Phrase has a head Verb, ‘watch’. The same is true of Prepositional Phrases and Adjective Phrases which have preposition heads and adjective heads respectively.

Sentence

Noun Phrase Verb Phrase

D eterminer Noun Verb Noun Phrase

Determiner Noun

The boy watched the film

One of the principles of the grammatical phrase structure is indeed that the head of a phrase must be the same category as the whole phrase, so that a Verb Phrase has a head Verb not a Noun, a Noun Phrase has a head Noun not a Verb, and so on. All phrases in all languages must have heads of the same type as the phrase itself.

Universal Grammar theory then claims that it is a property of a human language that all its phrases obey the principle that the head of the phrase is the same type of expression as the whole phrase.

X phrase

X head anything else

X – stands for the same category

But languages differ markedly in word order like Verb-Object order and Object-Verb order that distinguishes English, for example, from Japanese. In English the Verb is followed by an object Noun Phrase, e.g. bought a book. In Japanese the Verb is preceded by the object Noun Phrase, e.g. hon-o-katta ( book bought). In UG this two-way choice is a parameter specifying the position of object Noun Phrases within the Verb Phrase; languages must have Verb Phrases that are either VO or OV order. The two phrases could be shown as:

English Verb Phrase Japanese Verb Phrase

head Verb Noun Phrase Noun Phrase head Verb

bought a book hon-o katta

( book bought)

The word order in the Preposition Phrase also varies between languages like English that have a preposition before the Noun Phrase ( e.g. on Tuesday), and those like Japanese that have a postposition after the Noun Phrase (e.g. Tuesday on-kayobi ni).

Furthermore, some languages, such as English, have Noun Phrases where the noun precedes a modifying phrase (e.g. the claim that he is right), others, like Japanese, have Noun Phrases in which the noun follows the modifying phrase.

Universal Grammar ascribes all these order variations to a single parameter. The word order differences among these four types of lexical phrase amount to whether the head comes first or last in the phrase. In the Preposition Phrase, English has the head preposition before the Noun Phrase, Japanese has the head postposition after the Noun Phrase. In the Verb Phrase, English has the verb before the object phrase, Japanese has the verb after the object noun phrase, and so on. All these phenomena can be brought together into a single statement: either a language has lexical phrases in which the head comes first or it has phrases in which the head comes last.

Head-first structure Head-last structure

a ny lexical phrase any lexical phrase

head(X) phrase phrase head(X)

This is called the ‘head’ parameter because it concerns the location of the head of the phrase in relation to other phrases within it – English is a head-first language while Japanese is a head-last language.

Much of the phrase structure of language can therefore be reduced to a principle that heads are required and a parameter with two positions in which they can occur. Putting the analysis in this form brings the phrase structure of all languages together within one framework. The description of any single language is no longer isolated but always located within the framework of the whole human language. So the principles and parameters theory provides linguists with a powerful tool for investigating any human language.