Universal Grammar in Noam Chomsky’s generative theory of language

Bibliogr. s. 66-69

The paper overviews the evolution of the views on Universal Grammar in Chomsky’s generative theory of language. Originally envisaged as a rich, complex, highly specific and unique system of rules, principles and constraints underlying the speaker’s ability to produce and understand an infinitude of novel sentences and later, also to acquire language on the basis of impoverished data, Universal Grammar is currently reduced to a "bare minimum", containing only a universal set of features for the assembly of lexical items, the elementary binary operation of Merge (and a few others) as well as a restricted set of general principles and constraints. Some of these principles and constraints, if not all, may be grounded in language-external, general principles shaping the structure of organic forms and their course of development, in principles of learning, and efficient computation. While this leaner theory of Universal Grammar is a welcome development in the pursuit of "the essence of language", bringing it closer to the foundational assumptions of typological-functional linguistics, a rival universalist approach to language, Chomsky’s current theory of Universal Grammar raises many questions, including important questions about the nature of the human lexicon, the origin of lexical features, and their relation to human cognition.