universal grammar

plural universal grammars

1. human sciencesA hypothetical innate abstract system in the human brain that underlies the grammar of all human languages.

   1 more example

   At this point, let's gather together various loose ends, and try and paint a simple picture of the overall model of grammar which we are moving towards. We might suppose that Universal Grammar makes available a set of category- neutral pairs of rule-schemas such as those numbered (i) and (ii) in (168–170) above. The members of each pair of rule-schemas differ only in respect of the relative ordering of constituents. The task of the child acquiring the grammar of a particular language is thus to determine which ordering options are selected in the language he is acquiring. For example, the child has to deter- mine whether a given language is a head-first language incorporating rule- schema (168) (i), or a head-last language incorporating schema (168) (ii): in other words, the child has to ‘setʼ the relevant word-order parameter for Com- plements, Specifiers, Adjuncts, and so forth. The picture is complicated by the fact that some languages permit more than one ordering option: for example, as we have already seen, English selects the head-first and specifier-first orders as the unmarked option, but also selects the ‘mirror imageʼ orders as a marked option.

   1988, Andrew Radford, chapter 5, in Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 276