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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.
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.
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 ]
The grammar model discussed in Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) In Aspects, Chomsky summarized his proposed structure of a grammar in the following way: "A grammar contains a syntactic component, a semantic component and a phonological component...The syntactic component consists of a base and a transformational component ...
To convert a grammar to Chomsky normal form, a sequence of simple transformations is applied in a certain order; this is described in most textbooks on automata theory. [4]: 87–94 [5] [6] [7] The presentation here follows Hopcroft, Ullman (1979), but is adapted to use the transformation names from Lange, Leiß (2009).
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.
Generative grammar began in the late 1950s with the work of Noam Chomsky, having roots in earlier approaches such as structural linguistics. The earliest version of Chomsky's model was called Transformational grammar, with subsequent iterations known as Government and binding theory and the Minimalist program.