The document discusses Noam Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar (UG), which proposes that the ability to learn grammar is innate. UG suggests that all human languages share certain fundamental structural rules and properties. Children are born with an innate language faculty that allows them to unconsciously analyze the linguistic input they receive according to these principles and parameters of UG to acquire their first language.

1. Universal Grammar
• Chomsky and his followers no longer use
the term LAD, but refer to the child’s
innate endowment as Universal
Grammar (UG).
• UG is a theory in linguistics, usually
credited to Noam Chomsky, proposing
that the ability to learn grammar is hard-
wired into the brain.
• The theory suggests that linguistic ability
manifests itself without being taught
(see Poverty of the stimulus), and that
there are properties that all natural
human languages share.

2.  Universal Grammar: The system of categories, operations,
and principles shared by all human languages and
considered to be innate.
 In linguistics, the theory of universal grammar holds that
there are certain basic structural rules that govern
language that all humans know without having to learn
them.
 This is one way to explain how humans acquire language —
if the brain is already primed to understand certain sentence
structures, it explains how children can understand and
speak sentences that they've never heard before.
Supporters of this theory point to the elements that are
common in different languages as evidence.

3. Universal Grammar (UG) continues the tradition which
Chomsky introduced in his earlier work. Two concepts in
particular have been of central importance:
(1) What needs to be accounted for in language
acquisition is linguistic competence, or speaker/hearers’
underlying knowledge of language.
This is distinguished from linguistic performance, or
speaker-hearers ’actual use of language in specific
instances.
(2) Such knowledge of language goes beyond what could
be learned from the input people receive. This is the
logical problem of language learning , or the poverty-of-the
stimulus argument.

4.  Chomsky and his followers have claimed since the
1950s that the nature of speaker/hearers’
competence in their native language can be
accounted for only by innate knowledge that the
human species is genetically endowed with.
If a language faculty indeed exists, it is a potential
solution to the “logical problem” because its existence
would mean that children already have a rich
system of linguistic knowledge which they bring
to the task of L1 learning. They wouldn’t need to
learn this underlying system, but only build upon it
“on the basis of other inner resources activated by a
limited and fragmentary linguistic experience”.

5. UG- Principles and Parameters
1. the invariants of human language (the principles)
2. Cross-linguistic variation (the parameters)
The central idea of principles and parameters is that a person's
syntactic knowledge can be modeled with two formal
mechanisms:
• A finite set of fundamental principles that are common to all
languages; e.g., that a sentence must always have a subject,
even if it is not overtly pronounced.
• A finite set of parameters that determine syntactic variability
amongst languages.
• Example for parameters: In English and in French, the plural is
formed by adding (s) to the singular. However, there are many
exceptions: first, you cannot add (s) if the word ends in (z) and
second, when the word ends in (eau), the plural is formed by
adding (x). There are also six words that also form their plural
with (x): bijou, caillou, chou, genou, hibou, joujou, pou. Here
are some examples:

6. An example of an early principle which Chomsky
posited stipulates that every phrase in every
language has the same elements including a Head:
e.g. a noun phrase (NP) must always have a noun
head (N), a verb phrase (VP) must always have a verb
head (V), a prepositional or postpositional phrase
(PP) must always have a preposition or postposition
head (P), and so forth. The only choice, or parameter
setting, that speakers have in different languages is
Head Direction, or the position of the head in
relation to other elements in the phrase. There are
only two possible choices: head-initial or head-final.

7. UG-Principles and Parameters
Children who are learning English L1 receive input that lets them know
that English generally has a head-initial parameter setting. This is
because they hear sentences with the following word order:
a. John [kicked the ball] VP
I have put brackets around the VP in this example, and underlined the
head of that phrase, which is the verb kicked . The word order of this
VP provides evidence that the English parameter setting is headinitial,
because the verb kicked comes in front of the ball .
b. John rode [in the car] PP
Brackets are around the PP in this example, and its head is the
preposition in. This provides additional evidence that the parameter
setting for English is head-initial, because the preposition comes in
front of the car in the phrase.

8. UG-Principles and Parameters
In contrast, children who are learning Turkish L1
receive input that lets them know that Turkish
has a head-final parameter setting. They hear
sentences with the following word order:
a. Ali [topa vurdu] VP This provides evidence
that the Turkish parameter setting is headfinal,
because the verb «vurdu» comes after ‘topa’ in
the VP.

9. UG-Principles and Parameters
• Children acquiring English or Turkish as their
L1 need to hear only a limited amount of input
to set the parameter for this principle
correctly. That parameter setting then
presumably guides them in producing the
correct word order in an unlimited number of
utterances which they have not heard before,
since the general principle stipulates that all
phrases in a language tend to have essentially
the same structure.

11.  Because knowledge of principles and parameters is
postulated to be innate, children are assumed to be
able to interpret and unconsciously analyze the
input they receive and construct the appropriate L1
grammar.

12. UG-POSITIVE EVIDENCE&NEGATIVE
EVIDENCE
Positive evidence is evidence that something is
possible in the language being learned. For example,
if a learner of Spanish encounters sentences that
have no subject, this serves as positive evidence that
subjects do not (always) have to be overtly expressed
in Spanish. Negative evidence is evidence that
something is not possible. For example, in English,
one can say He sometimes goes there, Sometimes
he goes there, or He goes there sometimes, but it is
ungrammatical to say *He goes sometimes there.

13. UG-POSITIVE EVIDENCE&NEGATIVE
EVIDENCE
 The child language literature suggests that negative
evidence is not frequent and can therefore not be a
necessary condition for acquisition.
 Because positive evidence alone cannot delineate teh
range of possible and impossible sentences, and because
negative evidence is not frequently forthcoming, there
must innate principles that constrain the possibilities of
grammar formation.

14. INITIAL STATE
The initial state refers to the beginning point of
learning. A initial state view based on UG argues that
babies are born with an innate capactiy for language.
But for SLA the following question can be asked:
What is the nature of the linguistic knowledge with
which learners begin SLA process?
There are two contrating views about that:
1. Fundamental Difference Hypothesis
2. Access to UG Hypothesis

15.  Fundamental Difference Hypothesis
This hypothesis starts from the belief that, with regard
to language learning, children and adults are different
in many important ways. Thus, FDH argues that L2
learners do not have access to UG.

16. Access to UG Hypothesis
According to this hypothesis we need an explanation
for the fact that learners eventually know more about
the language than they could reasonably have
learned if they had to depend entirely on the input
they are exposed to. The implication is that
knowledge of UG must be available to second
language learners as well as to first language
learners.

17.  The Bottleneck Hypothesis: This hypothesis
states that L2 learners are able to acquire syntax
and semantics, but the main challange is the
inflectional morphemens.
Inflectional morphemes serve as grammatical
markers that indicate tense, number, possession, or
comparison. Inflectional morphemes in English
include the suffixes -s (or -es); 's (or s'); -ed; -en; -er; -
est; and -ing.

18.  Markedness Differential Hypothesis: One way to
think of markedness is that an unmarked form,
whether phonological or syntactic, is one that more
common, more usual, in the world’s languages than
a marked one

19.  In phonology, the most common syllable structure which
occurs in languages of the world is CV (consonant + vowel, as
in me and ba-nana), so this structure is “unmarked.”
 In vocabulary, the preposition in denotes location while the
preposition into is more complex, denoting both location and
directionality. Into is thus “marked” in contrast with in because
it is both structurally and conceptually more complex.
 In syntax, the basic word order in sentences of SVO (subject–
verb– object) is more common in languages of the world than
is SOV. SVO is thus relatively “unmarked” and SOV relatively
“marked.”
 "Lion" can refer to either male or female lions, whereas
"lioness" refers to only female lions. In this example "lioness"
is marked and "lion" is unmarked. This is because "lion" is the
more general term.