the present study investigated comparatively the impact of two types of input enhancement (i.e. textual vs. compound enhancement) on developing grammar ability in iranian efl setting. sixty-five female secondary high school students were selected as a homogenous sample out of about a 100-member population based on nelson language proficiency test. then, their grammar ability was measured based ...

The idea of Universal Grammar (UG) as the hypothetical linguistic structure shared by all human languages harkens back at least to the 13th century. The best known modern elaborations of the idea are due to Chomsky. Following a devastating critique from theoretical, typological and field linguistics, these elaborations, the idea of UG itself and the more general idea of language universals stan...

Machine Translation (MT) is seen as a mapping from a source language string into a target language string via an internal representation. I restrict the internal representations to derivation trees that can be generated from context-free grammars (CFG). It is shown that there are more than n! possible representations for an input string of length 1 < n < 20. Given this untractable complexity of...

We examine the class of languages that can be defined entirely in terms of provability in an extension of the sorted type theory (Tyn) by embedding the logic of phonologies, without introduction of special types for syntactic entities. This class is proven to precisely coincide with the class of logically closed languages that may be thought of as functions from expressions to sets of logically...

One of the most astonishing discovery of Chomsky [13] is the universal grammar which is a model of how human language works. The universal grammar is an innate combinatorial system from which every language, French, English, Japanese, can be derived. What is the implication of Chomsky’s universal grammar for grammatical inference? We think it gives a strong intuition for the mathematical modeli...

The question of identifying the properties of language that are specific human linguistic abilities, i.e., Universal Grammar, lies at the center of linguistic research. This paper argues for a largely Emergent Grammar in phonology, taking as the starting point that memory, categorization, attention to frequency, and the creation of symbolic systems are all nonlinguistic characteristics of the h...