The document discusses the Language Acquisition Device (LAD), a hypothetical brain module that explains children's innate ability to acquire language. It introduces the concept of Universal Grammar (UG), suggesting that the ability to understand grammar is hard-wired in the brain and that all languages share common grammatical structures. The text highlights how generative grammar underlies language comprehension, enabling the formation of new sentences.

1. Language
Acquisition
Device

2. What is Language Acquisition
Device?
is a hypothetical
module of the brain
posited to account for
childrens innate pre-
disposition for language
acquisition.

3. The LAD Theory
posits that a set list of acceptable
sentence structures -that is,
possible combinations of
subjects, verbs, objects, and
modifiers — are known to
children at birth.

4. (a)
Generative
Grammar
Structural
Description
Primary
Linguistic data
utterance A
B(b)

6. What is Universal Grammar?
Universal Grammar (UG) is a
theory in linguistic.
• Ability to learn grammar is
hard-wired into the brain.

7. The concept of UG
has been traced to the
observation of Roger Bacon,
a 13th century Franciscan Friar and Philosopher,
that all languages are built upon common
grammar.

8. The Expression was
popularized in the 1950s
and 1960s by Noam Chomsky
and other linguistic.

9. • Acquiring language
cannot be reduced to
simply developing an
inventory of response to
stimuli, because every sentence
that anyone produces can be a totally
new combination of words.

10. Generative Grammar
refers to the set of rules that enables to
understand sentences but of which we
are usually totally unaware.
“that’s how you say it”
RATHER THAN
“how that’s you it say”
Ex.

11. Generative Grammar
refers to the set of rules that enables to
understand sentences but of which we
are usually totally unaware.
“Bob” and “him”
• Bob loves him.
• Bob knows that his father loves him.
Ex.

12. Generative Grammar
NOTE:
Generative grammar has
nothing to do with grammar
textbooks, whose purpose is
simply to explain what
grammatically correct and
incorrect in given language.

13. • All languages
in the world must share
certain structural properties.

14. • Chomsky and the other,
Generative linguists like him
Shown that 5000 to 6000languages
in the world, despite their different grammars,
do share a set of syntactic rules and principles.

15. Universal Grammar and
Second Language Acquisition
L1 Input
UG Principle
ParametersL2 Input
a grammar of L1
a grammar of L2