The Nature of Universal Grammar

The approach adopted in this book is to look at the general ideas of the Chomskyan theory of UC without reference to their historical origins. Nevertheless some allu­sions have to be made to the different versions that have been employed over the years and the history of the theory needs to be briefly sketched, partly so that the reader is not confused by picking up a book with other terminology.

Development has taken place at two levels. On one level are the' general concepts about language and language acquisition on which the theory is based. The origins of such ideas as competence and performance or the iateness of language can be traced back to the late fifties or mid-sixties. These have grown continuously over the years rather than being superseded or abandoned. On this level the UG Theory is recognizable in any of its incarnations and the broad out­lines have remained substantially the same despite numerous additions.

On another level come ideas about the description of syntax, which fall into definite historical phases. Different periods in the Chomskyan description of syntax have tended to become known by the names of particular books. Each was characterized by certain concepts, which were often rejected by the next period; hence the statements of one period are often difficult to translate into those of the next. Unlike the continuity of the general ideas, there are shifts in the concepts of syntax, leading to a series of apparent discontinuities and changes of direction.

The original model, Syntactic Structures, took its name from the title of

, Chomsky's 1957 book, which established the notion of 'generative grammar' itself, with its emphasis on explicit 'generative', formal description through 'rewrite rules' such as S ---7 NP VP, as described below. It made a separation between phrase structure rules that generated the basic structures, called 'kernel sentences', and transformations which altered these in various ways by turning them into pas­sive or negative sentences etc.; hence its popular name was 'transformational gen­erative grammar' or 'TGC'. Its most memorable product was the sentence: