Universal grammar theory suggests that humans have an innate ability to understand and use grammatical language. This is supported by the poverty-of-stimulus argument, but critics argue that physicality and falsifiability must also be considered. Noam Chomsky proposed this theory in the 1950s, and it remains controversial.
In linguistics, universal grammar theory holds that there are some basic structural rules that govern language that all human beings know without having to learn them. This is one way of explaining how humans acquire language: If the brain is already primed to understand certain sentence structures, it explains how children can understand and speak sentences they’ve never heard before. Proponents of this theory point to elements that are common across different languages as proof.
Theory
The ability for language – the ability of humans to develop ways to communicate complicated information – is a complex phenomenon that researchers have tried to explain in many different ways. In the early 20th century, most experts believed that language was learned like any other process, through imitation and trial and error. In contrast, universal grammar theory argues that there are deeper physical processes at work: that the brain itself is designed to enable humans to use grammatical language. Assuming this is true, humans could theoretically develop language without other people teaching it.
This approach is contextual in the sense that although there are beliefs that there are similarities between all languages, not all languages have the same grammar. It does not attempt to determine independent facts that hold for every single language on Earth. However, these rules outline how human languages develop in the face of these basic principles. By combining rules with observations about a language, linguists can often determine the word order, phonemes, and other fundamental features of a language.
History
The observation that there appear to be rules common to all human languages has existed since at least the 13th century. Historically, philosophers believed that these characteristics came from the language of the Garden of Eden, which was thought to be the original language of mankind. This theory has largely been abandoned in favor of alternatives that attribute these commonalities to the evolution of the human mind and the way it processes language.
The most famous aspect of this line of thought was proposed by linguist Noam Chomsky in the 1950s. Chomsky proposed a universal grammar hardwired into the brains of all humans underpinning all languages. With his reasoning, children learn their native languages using this wired grammar as a support structure. Even so, the child has yet to be taught the specific characteristics of his or her language through social interaction.
Poverty of stimulus
One of the main propositions underlying the theory of universal grammar is called the poverty-of-stimulus argument. This statement states that children are not exposed to enough stimuli – people who speak their native language – to be able to learn the language correctly. There are a great many ways words can be put together, and no rule for doing so is obviously more correct than any other. Furthermore, this argument states that children are usually given positive evidence about how to speak correctly, but are rarely given negative evidence or correction when they speak ungrammatically. Yet children, despite a relatively small amount of input, reliably learn the grammatical structures of their language. This, the argument goes, must mean that there is an innate capacity for language structures.
This topic is highly controversial and has many critics. Some argue that the amount of stimulation a child receives from listening to other speakers is actually enough information to learn the basic grammar of the language, and that the brain can recognize patterns in the language to fill in what is missing. Others argue that children are corrected and told when a sentence is grammatically incorrect, and the fact that they are rarely (or never) exposed to ungrammatical sentences teaches them that those grammatical structures are wrong.
More criticisms
Some evolutionary biologists have argued that the physicality of language cannot be ignored when considering how language developed. Language doesn’t just involve one part of the brain, it involves a combination of neural structures. The anatomy of the mouth, tongue and throat is important, they say, as is the need for all these parts to move together to produce speech. It is the development of motor control that provides the foundation for speech development.
Another argument against universal grammar is that the theory itself is not falsifiable; in other words, there is no way to prove it wrong. It claims to be able to predict what new languages will be like, but the sample size is small enough that as new languages are discovered, established rules are sometimes adjusted to fit the new data. If a theory cannot be tested, it cannot be argued, then it cannot be scientific. This may undermine its validity as a strong predictive theory, but may leave its descriptive accuracy intact.
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