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Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky.The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be.
The Chomsky hierarchy in the fields of formal language theory, computer science, and linguistics, is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars. A formal grammar describes how to form strings from a language's vocabulary (or alphabet) that are valid according to the language's syntax.
The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory or LSLT is a major work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky.It was written in 1955 and published in 1975. In 1955, Chomsky submitted a part of this book as his PhD thesis titled Transformational Analysis, setting out his ideas on transformational grammar; he was awarded a Ph.D. for it, and it was privately distributed among specialists on ...
In the sixth chapter titled "On the Goals of Linguistic Theory", Chomsky writes that his "fundamental concern" is "the problem of justification of grammars". [10] He draws parallels between the theory of language and theories in physical sciences. He compares a finite corpus of utterances of a particular language to "observations".
Chomsky defines three levels of success for any linguistic theory. These are "observational adequacy" (i.e. correctly picking out the valid linguistic data that linguists must work on), "descriptive adequacy" (i.e. assigning clear structural description to elements of sentences) and "explanatory adequacy" (i.e. justifying, with the help of a principled basis, the selection of a descriptive ...
In Aspects, Chomsky lays down the abstract, idealized context in which a linguistic theorist is supposed to perform his research: "Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions ...
Noam Chomsky's theory of a universal grammar (UG) aims to describe the grammatical constraints common across naturally arising human language.One constraint is the projection principle—that lexical features are preserved at every syntactic level.
Chomsky, Noam (1986), Barriers, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press; Kordić, Snježana (1991). "Transformacijsko-generativni pristup jeziku u Sintaktičkim strukturama i Aspektima teorije sintakse Noama Chomskog" [Transformational-generative approach to language in Syntactic structures and Aspects of the theory of syntax of Noam Chomsky] (PDF).