Тіл қабілетінің биологиялық компоненті туралы теория

Theory of the biological component of the language faculty

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. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare, and the theory of universal grammar remains controversial among linguists.

In an article entitled "The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?" Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch present the three leading hypotheses for how language evolved and brought humans to the point where they have a universal grammar. The first hypothesis states that the faculty of language in the broad sense (FLb) is strictly homologous to animal communication. This means that homologous aspects of the faculty of language exist in non human animals. The second hypothesis states that the FLb is a derived and uniquely human adaptation for language. This hypothesis holds that individual traits were subject to natural selection and came to be specialized for humans. The third hypothesis states that only the faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLn) is unique to humans. It holds that while mechanisms of the FLb are present in both human and non human animals, the computational mechanism of recursion has evolved recently, and solely in humans. This hypothesis aligns most closely with the typical theory of universal grammar championed by Chomsky.

The term "universal grammar" predates Noam Chomsky, but pre Chomskyan ideas of universal grammar are different. For Chomsky, UG is "[the] theory of the genetically based language faculty", which makes UG a theory of language acquisition, and part of the innateness hypothesis. Earlier grammarians and philosophers thought about universal grammar in the sense of a universally shared property or grammar of all languages. The closest analog to their understanding of universal grammar in the late 20th century are Greenberg's linguistic universals. Chomsky defined universal grammar as "the study of the conditions that must be met by the grammars of all human languages" or "the theory of language structure". The idea of a universal grammar can be traced back to Roger Bacon's observations in his c. 1245 – c. no Overview of Grammar and c. 1268 – c. no Greek Grammar that all languages are built upon a common grammar, even though it may undergo incidental variations; and the 13th century speculative grammarians who, following Bacon, postulated universal rules underlying all grammars. The concept of a universal grammar or language was at the core of the 17th century projects for philosophical languages. An influential work in that time was Grammaire générale by Claude Lancelot and Antoine Arnauld. They tried to describe a general grammar for languages, coming to the conclusion that grammar has to be universal. There is a Scottish school of universal grammarians from the 18th century, as distinguished from the philosophical language project, which included authors such as James Beattie, Hugh Blair, James Burnett, James Harris, and Adam Smith. The article on grammar in the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1771) contains an extensive section titled "Of Universal Grammar". This tradition was continued in the late 19th century by Wilhelm Wundt and in the early 20th century by linguist Otto Jespersen. Jespersen disagreed with early grammarians on their formulation of "universal grammar", arguing that they tried to derive too much from Latin, and that a UG based on Latin was bound to fail considering the breadth of worldwide linguistic variation. He does not fully dispense with the idea of a "universal grammar", but reduces it to universal syntactic categories or super categories, such as number, tenses, etc. Jespersen does not discuss whether these properties come from facts about general human cognition or from a language specific endowment (which would be closer to the Chomskyan formulation). As this work predates molecular genetics, he does not discuss the notion of a genetically conditioned universal grammar. During the rise of behaviorism, the idea of a universal grammar (in either sense) was discarded. In the early 20th century, language was usually understood from a behaviourist perspective, suggesting that language acquisition, like any other kind of learning, could be explained by a succession of trials, errors, and rewards for success. In other words, children learned their mother tongue by simple imitation, through listening and repeating what adults said. For example, when a child says "milk" and the mother will smile and give her child milk as a result, the child will find this outcome rewarding, thus enhancing the child's language development. UG reemerged to prominence and influence in modern linguistics with the theories of Chomsky and Montague in the 1950s–1970s, as part of the "linguistics wars". In 2016 Chomsky and Berwick co wrote their book titled Why Only Us, where they defined both the minimalist program and the strong minimalist thesis and its implications to update their approach to UG theory. According to Berwick and Chomsky, the strong minimalist thesis states that "The optimal situation would be that UG reduces to the simplest computational principles which operate in accord with conditions of computational efficiency. This conjecture is called the Strong Minimalist Thesis (SMT)." The significance of SMT is to significantly shift the previous emphasis on universal grammars to the concept which Chomsky and Berwick now call "merge". "Merge" is defined in their 2016 book when they state "Every computational system has embedded within it somewhere an operation that applies to two objects X and Y already formed, and constructs from them a new object Z. Call this operation Merge." SMT dictates that "Merge will be as simple as possible: it will not modify X or Y or impose any arrangement on them; in particular, it will leave them unordered, an important fact Merge is therefore just set formation: Merge of X and Y yields the set {X, Y}."

The presence of creole languages is sometimes cited as further support for this theory, especially by Bickerton's controversial language bioprogram theory. Creoles are languages that develop and form when disparate societies with no common language come together and are forced to devise a new system of communication. The system used by the original speakers is typically an inconsistent mix of vocabulary items, known as a pidgin. As these speakers' children begin to acquire their first language, they use the pidgin input to effectively create their own original language, known as a creole. Unlike pidgins, creoles have native speakers (those with acquisition from early childhood) and make use of a full, systematic grammar. According to Bickerton, the idea of universal grammar is supported by creole languages because certain features are shared by virtually all in the category. For example, their default point of reference in time (expressed by bare verb stems) is not the present moment, but the past. Using pre verbal auxiliaries, they uniformly express tense, aspect, and mood. Negative concord occurs, but it affects the verbal subject (as opposed to the object, as it does in languages like Spanish). Another similarity among creoles can be seen in the fact that questions are created simply by changing the intonation of a declarative sentence, not its word order or content. However, extensive work by Carla Hudson Kam and Elissa Newport suggests that creole languages may not support a universal grammar at all. In a series of experiments, Hudson Kam and Newport looked at how children and adults learn artificial grammars. They found that children tend to ignore minor variations in the input when those variations are infrequent, and reproduce only the most frequent forms. In doing so, they tend to standardize the language that they hear around them. Hudson Kam and Newport hypothesize that in a pidgin development situation (and in the real life situation of a deaf child whose parents are or were disfluent signers), children systematize the language they hear, based on the probability and frequency of forms, and not that which has been suggested on the basis of a universal grammar. Further, it seems to follow that creoles would share features with the languages from which they are derived, and thus look similar in terms of grammar. Many researchers of universal grammar argue against a concept of relexification, which says that a language replaces its lexicon almost entirely with that of another. This goes against universalist ideas of a universal grammar, which has an innate grammar.

There is no support in genetics or brain research for the claim that syntactic structures are innate. Although early brain lesion studies have been interpreted as pointing to a modular view of language, which could support Chomsky's idea of a language organ, the advent of neuroimaging has made it evident that language relates to several different functions of the brain. Chomsky's explanation that language stems from a single gene mutation is likewise incompatible with the data from comparative genomics: it is not possible for a single mutation to specify a whole cognitive function. By contrast, there is evidence from neuroimaging for the inverse idea that different languages shape the brain in different ways. Research using high resolution diffusion weighted MRI and tractography based network statistics of the language connectome suggests that the white matter brain connectivity adapts to the characteristic syntactic processing demands of the person's native language. ERP imaging has found that sentence processing is the matter of interaction of syntax and semantics, rather than occurring along innate and arbitrary pathways. However, Chomsky rejects neuroplasticity and connectionism, which, according to him, constitute a denial of human freedom. According to Chomsky, his theory of an innate language organ and an innate moral organ oppose a philosophy of social control. Research in computational linguistics indicates the existence of unifying syntactic structures across all natural languages. For instance, sentence structures of English and Japanese only appear to differ on the surface but possess the same structures underneath. This phenomenon, known as universal syntactic structures, suggests languages work the same way. Such findings, however, were already known to classical and logical grammar, which proposed universal grammar as a logical necessity, and linguistic typology has found empirical evidence for numerous cross linguistic tendencies underlying human languages. There is, however, no specific support for Chomsky's notion of genetically determined grammar.