Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 universal grammar is a study of "I-language" (internalized language), not "E-language" (externalized language). Cook distinguishes Chomsky's linguistic universals from implicational universals. [1] On first-language acquisition (FLA), Cook presents Chomsky's nativist perspective—that humans are born with innate knowledge of natural language.
Chomsky developed transformational grammar in the mid-1950s, whereupon it became the dominant syntactic theory in linguistics for two decades. [165] " Transformations" are syntactic rules that derive surface structure from deep structure , which was often considered to reflect the structure of meaning. [ 145 ]
A linguistic theory that aims for explanatory adequacy is concerned with the internal structure of the device [i.e. grammar]; that is, it aims to provide a principled basis, independent of any particular language, for the selection of the descriptively adequate grammar of each language.
The theory of grammar meets the criterion of conceptual necessity; this is the Strong Minimalist Thesis introduced by Chomsky in (2001). [5] Consequently, language is an optimal association of sound with meaning; the language faculty satisfies only the interface conditions imposed by the A-P and C-I performance systems; PF and LF are the only ...
In formal language theory, the Chomsky–Schützenberger enumeration theorem is a theorem derived by Noam Chomsky and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger about the number of words of a given length generated by an unambiguous context-free grammar. The theorem provides an unexpected link between the theory of formal languages and abstract algebra.
The language module or language faculty is a hypothetical structure in the human brain which is thought to contain innate capacities for language, originally posited by Noam Chomsky. There is ongoing research into brain modularity in the fields of cognitive science and neuroscience , although the current idea is much weaker than what was ...