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Essay On Universal Grammar

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What is grammar?, a question that seems plain to answer until somebody asks it. Dictionaries usually say something like the rules in a language for changing the form of words and combining them into sentences(Oxford dictionary). This is seriously insufficient; grammar does many things besides sentence-building. The definition also says nothing about the reasons why we need such rules; as if one defined a train as a ‘large vehicle’, without mentioning its use for public transport ( Michael swan, 2008) . For linguists, grammar is a fixed set of words and rules of usage. They consider "good" grammar is synonymous with prestige forms of the language. Therefore, Eugene. J. Hill defines grammar as a description of certain organizing …show more content…

This indicates that it presents grammar to teachers and students as a set of tools they can use rather than a set of rules about what not to do (Christie, F. ,1991). Universal grammar that can be traced to the observation of Roger Bacon, a 13th-century Franciscan friar and philosopher, that all languages are built upon a common grammar which is considered to be innate. Actually the linguistic principles of Universal Grammar constitute a theory of the organization of the initial state of the mind/brain of the language learner--that is, a theory of the human faculty for language." (S. Crain and R. Thornton, 2000). There is also, theoretical grammar which is the study of the essential components of any human language to provide scientific arguments or explanations in favor of one account of grammar rather than another, in terms of a general theory of human language. (A. Renouf and A. Kehoe, 2003). Moreover, there is Generative grammar which can be regarded as a kind of confluence of long-forgotten concerns of the study of language and mind, and new understanding provided by the formal

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