Universal grammar

The universal grammar (GU) is a linguistic theory of the transformational and generative school that affirms that certain common principles underlie all natural languages. In this theory it is said that these principles are innate within our human condition and it goes beyond Jespersen's notional grammar, of which it is heir.

This theory does not claim that all natural languages have the same grammar, or that all humans are "programmed" with a structure that underlies all the expressions of human languages, but there are a series of rules that help children to acquire their mother tongue.

Those who study universal grammar aim to abstract generalizations common to various languages, often in the following form: "If X is true, then Y occurs". This study has been extended to numerous linguistic disciplines, such as phonology and psycholinguistics.

Two linguists who have had considerable influence in this area, either directly or through the school they have promoted, are Noam Chomsky and Richard Montague.

The argument, said synthetically, is the following: if human beings who grow and develop under normal conditions (that is, not in extreme conditions of any kind), always develop a language with a property X (which could be, for example, distinguishing between nouns and verbs, or distinguishing function words and lexical words), then it can be inferred that the property X is not part of a particular grammar, but is part of the so-called universal grammar.

Universal grammar, in this way, is a powerful concept that is full of repercussions, and not exempt from certain difficulties of definition. In general, it could be said that the universal grammar would be the set of grammatical properties that a human brain develops under normal conditions; or, put another way, a property of the human brain that enables it to develop a certain set of grammatical rules and content, provided that its development occurs under non-extreme conditions.

Noam Chomsky himself argued that the human brain contains a limited set of rules for organizing its knowledge of language. Therefore, it is possible to think that all languages have a basic common structure, and to this structure Chomsky applied the label of "universal grammar".

Thus, speakers who are fluent in a certain language know perfectly well which expressions are acceptable in that language and which expressions are not. The key of the Chomskian study is, therefore, the following: how is it possible that these speakers can come to know the restrictions of their language, if they have never learned the expressions that violate those restrictions? Indeed, this absence of negative evidence for certain grammatical structures does not prevent speakers from assuming them as such, as ungrammatical elements, naturally. This irrefutable fact allowed Chomsky to establish that, beyond the superficial differences in the organization of words that exist between different languages, all languages share a deep structure that is natural, that is, that is part of the same human brain..

However, Chomskian theory has recursion as something intrinsic to human language as the central axis of its study and, all of this, is contradicted years later by Professor Daniel L Everett, who questions whether recursion is common to all languages, based on his studies on the Pirahã language.