Universal Grammar (UG) theory has been one of the most important research topics in linguistics since introduced five decades ago. UG specifies the restricted set of languages learnable by human brain, and thus, many researchers believe in its biological roots. Numerous empirical studies of neurobiological and cognitive functions of the human brain, and of many natural languages, have been cond...

Universal Grammar (UG) proposed by Chomsky (1986) has gained a large popularity in linguistics study. The paper firstly illustrates the background and major contents of UG and second language acquisition (SLA). Then it addresses the three hypotheses of UG in SLA, which center on whether adult language learners have access to the principles and parameters of UG in constructing the grammar of a s...

the present study was an attempt to investigate the acquisition of negationproperties by persian monolingual and kurdish-persian bilingual learners of englishacross different levels of language proficiency and within a generative framework.generative models are generally concerned with issues such as universal grammar(ug), language transfer, and morphological variability in nonprimary languaged...

  Abstract The present study begins by sketching "Chaos/Complexity Theory" (C/CT) and its applica-tion to the nature of language and language acquisition. Then, the theory of "Universal Grammar" (UG) is explicated with an eye to C/CT. Firstly, it is revealed that CCT may or may not be allied with a theory of language acquisition that takes UG as the initial state of language acquisition for ...

although the majority of linguists believing in chomskyan revolution have no doubt about the presence of ug in ll acquisition, its availability in l2 acquisition _in general, and in adult l2 acquisition in particular, is controversial. on the one hand, there are proponents of the access to ug in l2 acquisition, lidia white for example, says: therange of option available to the second language l...

Everett (2016b) criticizes The Phonological Mind thesis (Berent, 2013a,b) on logical, methodological and empirical grounds. Most of Everett's concerns are directed toward the hypothesis that the phonological grammar is constrained by universal grammatical (UG) principles. Contrary to Everett's logical challenges, here I show that the UG hypothesis is readily falsifiable, that universality is no...

Unification grammars (UG) are a grammatical formalism that underlies several contemporary linguistic theories, including Lexical-functional Grammar and Head-driven Phrase-structure Grammar. UG is an especially attractive formalism because of its expressivity, which facilitates the expression of complex linguistic structures and relations. Formally, UG is Turing-complete, generating the entire c...

Under normal circumstances, acquiring a first language, compared to acquiring a second or third language, seems to come naturally and successfully. This natural process of first language acquisition (henceforth L1A) appears to be illogical. This is because what first language learners (henceforth L1ers) attain (i.e. a grammar of adult native speakers of a given language) goes beyond the positiv...

This study investigated the relationship between Iranian high school students’ Universal Grammar knowledge and their performance on such standardized general English proficiency tests as PET and FCE internationally administered by Cambridge University. To this end, 108 students were randomly chosen from some high schools located in Malayer from Hamedan. Since this study was correlational in nat...

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...