Presented By Ata ul ghafer & Shoiba sabir Department of Applied Linguistics GCUF

1. UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
(UG)

2. OUTLINE
• INTRODUCTION
• HISTORY
• UG
• UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR ARGUMENTS
• LAD
• GENRATIVE GRAMMAR
• Principles and parameters
• Criticism of UG Theory

3. INTRODUCTION
• How do people learn a language?
• Do we learn language the way we learn everything?
• Or is there some special way our brains learns a language?

4. HISTORY
• FORMER THEORIES
• Structuralism()
• Behaviorism()
Burrhus Frederic Skinner
Ferdinand de Saussure

5. STRUCTURALISM
• DID NOT PROVIDE ANY FRAMEWORK OF HOW LEARNING TAKES PLACE.
• LEVELS OF PRODUCTION
• Lexicon Set of words
• Syntax S + v + O
• Morphology Un+limit+ed
• Phonology /skæfəld ŋ/ ɪ
• Semantics Meaning

6. BEHAVIORISM
• C O N D I T I O N I N G
• Stimulas
• Respons
• Reinforcement
The brain is “blank slate” at birth.

7. UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
• Noam Chomskey
• If children learn language by conditioning and imitation, why do they say things
they have never heard before?
• why can adults make completely novel sentences?
UG:It is a theory that suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the
brain, and manifest without being taught.

8. UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR ARGUMENTS
• Poverty of the Stimulus.
• Constraints and principles cannot be learned.
• Patterns of development are universal.

9. 1. POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS.
• Children hear only a finite number of sentences.
• They are able to abstract the rules and principles of the language.
• They Produce a infinite number of possible sentences without any formal training.
• Ungrammatical input
• Grammatical acceptable output

10. 2.CONSTRAINTS AND PRINCIPLES
CANNOT BE LEARNED
• Children are very young when acquiring L1.
• They do not have the cognitive ability to understand the principles of grammar as a
system.
• Because of innate capacity they are capable of producing correct grammar.

11. 3. PATTERNS OF DEVELOPMENT ARE
UNIVERSAL
• Children learn the various aspects of a language in a very similar order.
• Brown (1973).
• There is a very specific order of MORPHEME acquisition.
1. Present Progressive -ing * Daddy jumping
2. Plural –s * Many books
3. Irregular past forms * I run – I ran
• The sequence is quite fixed in order, but not in rate.
• All children learn in the same order, but some take longer than others.

12. LAD
• LAD
• Set of common grammatical rules.
• UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
• GENRATIVE GRAMMAR
• Refers to a set of rules that can predict which combinations of words are able to
make grammatically correct sentences.
• Example: “That’s how you say it”
• X “How that’s you say it”

13. PRINCIPLE AND PARAMETERS OF
UG
• A principle of UG is a statement that is true for all human languages. For example:
The principle of structure dependency.
• -A parameter must be set according to the requirements of the language being
acquired. For example: The null subject parameter.

14. THE STRUCTURE – DEPENDENCY :
• -Asserts that knowledge of language relies on the structural relationship in the
sentence such as words and morphemes rather than on the sequence of words.
To understand this sentences consist of phrases structural grouping of words,
sentences have phrase structure.
• For example: The child drew an elephant.
NP: The child ,
VP: drew and elephant ,
VP further breaks up into a V: drew and NP: an elephant.
These phrases can also break up into smaller constituents :
NP: The child ……. Det. The , and N: Child
NP: an elephant …. Det. An , and N: elephant

15. CONTI….
• In fact all the languages in the world are structured of phrase such as NP as the
main or central element (the head) of this phrase is a noun or pronoun and
sentences are made up of at least a NP or VP which in turn may optionally contain
other phrases or even whole sentences.
• The knowledge that languages are structure-dependent is a crucial aspect of all
human languages that has many implications it’s a principle of UG which explains
many of the operations we routinely perform in the language.
• Ex. Your cat is friendly
Is your cat friendly
• We change the basic order of the sentence (SVO) because its not based on the
linear order of the sentence but is structure - dependent.

16. MAJOR ASPECT OF THE PRINCIPLE OF
STRUCTURE DEPENDENCY
• Movements in the sentence is not just a matter of recognizing phrases and then of
moving them around but of moving the right element in the right phrase.
• -Structure dependency can therefore be put forward as a universal principle of
language, so whenever elements of the sentence are moved to form passive,
question, or whatever such movement takes account of the structural
relationships of the sentence rather than the linear order of the words. All known
formal operations in the grammar of English or of any other language are
structure-dependent

17. CONTI…
• Cook and Newson ( 1996) put it “ Movement in the sentence is not just a matter
of recognizing phrases and then of moving the right element in the right phrase:
movement depends on the structure of the sent-Both lexical and functional
categories form part of UG endowment , and do not have to be learnt. The child
selects from on the basis of the input, as not all languages will necessary make use
of all categories or their features.

18. PARAMETERS ( PARAMEDIC)
• According to White: -Languages can differ as to which functional categories are
realized in the grammar.
-For ex. Japanese lacks the category of Det . (determiner words These are four types are
known as articles, demonstratives, possessives, and quantifiers.)
• -The feature of a particular functional category can vary from language to
language.
-For ex. French has a gender feature while English doesn ’t .
-Features are said to vary in strength: a feature can be strong in one language and
weak in another.
-For ex. Inflections are strong in French and weak in English.

19. THE HEAD PARAMETER
• It specifies the order of certain elements in a language.
• One distinctive claim is that the essential element is each phrase is its head.
• Thus the verb phrase
• Drew an elephant has a head verb (drew)
• Noun phrase
The child has a head noun (child)
• Prepositional phrase
• By the manager has a head preposition (by).
• Complements
• An important way in which language very concerns where the head occurs in relationship to other
elements of the phrase, called complements.
• The head of the phrase can occur on the left of the complements or on their right.
• In the NP: “Education for life” the head noun education appears on the left of the complement
‘for life’.

20. • In the VP: Showed her the way. One head verb ‘showed’ appears on the left of the
complement ‘her’ and ‘the way’.
• In the PP: In the car The head preposition ‘in’ appears and the left of the
‘complement the car’.
• There are two possibilities for the structure in human languages.
Head-left Head-right
Chomsky (1970) suggested that the relative position of heads and complements
needs to be specified only once for all the phrases in a given language. Human
beings know that phrases can be either head-first or head-last; an English speaker has
learnt that English is head-first; a speaker of Japanese that Japanese is head-last and
soon.
• The variation between languages can now be expressed in terms of heads occur
first or last in the phrase. This is head parameter, the variation in order of elements
between languages amounts to a single choice between head first or head last.

21. GOVERNING CATEGORY
PARAMETER
• it can be exemplified by the precise relationship between reflexives and their non-
phrase antecedents.
• Ex. Mark wanted Tom to treat himself.
• Here ( himself) can only refer to Tom, not to Mark as the reflexive must be bound
with a local domain in English. In other languages that allow long binding such as
Chinese, himself can either refer to Tom or Mark.

22. • -According to Chomsky, a language is not then a system of rules but a set of
specifications for parameters in a variant system of principles of universal grammar.

23. • Hypothesis about Parameters Resetting:
• Children in early stages only have access to lexical categories and lack functional
categories.
• Some contradictory facts about SLA process:
Learners do not seem to produce wild grammars, that is grammar can only be
constrained by UG. Does that suggest that only principles of UG are available for
them?
• Learners produce grammar that are not necessarily like either their first or second
language. Does that suggest that parameter settings other than those realize in
first and second languages are available to them?
• Some principles and parameters seem to be unproblematic to reset , other more
difficult or even impossible . Why?

24. COOK (1985) PRESENTED THREE
HYPOTHESES
• Cook (1985) presented three hypotheses:
• No access hypothesis :
UG is inaccessible to L2 learner
• Indirect access hypothesis:
UG is partially available to the learners
• Direct access hypothesis:
UG is fully available

25. HYPOTHESIS 1: NO ACCESS TO UG
• proponents of this hypothesis argue that there is a critical period for SLA and after
puberty UG is no longer available to SLLs.
• -A study with immigrant children, age of arrivals, and grammatical properties were
examined.
• -Results: the ones before seven performed native -like while other made more
errors.
• -Opponents: it does not mean that adults grammars are not universal grammar -
constrained.

26. HYPOTHESIS 2: DIRECT/FULL
ACCESS TO UG
• Full access / no transfer: Flynn (1996) claims that there is no such thing as a critical
period. UG is accessible at initial stages of learning and parameter setting is done
directly to L2 values.
• L2 acquisition is similar to L1 as learners can acquire principles and parameter
settings which do not exist in their L1.

27. HYPOTHESIS 3: PARTIAL ACCESS
• No Parameter Resetting : Proponents of this hypothesis claim that learners have
only access to UG via their 1st language. They have already set parameters of their
1st language and this the basis for L2. other principles and parameters are not
available to them they have to resort other mechanism for different parameter
settings.

28. CRITICISM OF UG THEORY
• Linguistically, this approach is concern only with syntax.
• -Semantics, pragmatics and discourse are excluded.
• -UG is concerned exclusively with the developmental linguistic route. Social and
psychological variables are ignored.
• -UG approach is methodological. The theory is preoccupied with modeling of
competence, the study of naturalistic performance is not seen as a suitable source
to analyze mental representation of language.

29. Thank you for
Your attention