Talk:Universal grammar
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Initial discussion
First proposed by Noam Chomsky, Universal Grammar is that part of language that can be considered to be innate. As children develop they go through a stage of language acquisition which occurs much more rapidly than for most other mental abilities. This, along with many structural similarities between languages, suggests that there is a part of the human brain pre-wired through evolution allowing us to quickly assimilate and recognize linguistic patterns.
For example, the use of certain types of verbs implies a fixed set of possible nouns. "Come" for example implies one associated noun, a subject. In English we say "John is coming", in French "Jean vien". "Send" implies two associated nouns, a subject and an object. "John is sending a letter" in English. Or "Jan posla dopis" in Czech. "Give" on the other hand implies three nouns; a subject, direct object and indirect object, in this case the recipient. In English: "John is giving the letter to Mary". In French: "Jean donne la lettre a Marie". While what makes languages unique is the inability of non-speakers to understand phrases, phrases and sentences governed by verbs show similar patterns through all languages, as illustrated by the previous sentences. This similarity suggests that while sound and word patterns are specifically unique for any given language, there remains certain aspects of the underlying structure which is universal to all languages.
Universal Grammar covers the search for these common linguistic reflexes, and research into the mechanisms at work within the brain that make language acquisition possible.
Article cleanup
There was considerable redundancy and verbal fat in this article. Expressions like underlying principles, shared in common, that there exists and all human beings are all good examples of verbal excess.--NathanHawking 00:34, 2004 Oct 14 (UTC)