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Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science pp 1–2Cite as

Universal Grammar

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Synonyms

Mental grammar; UG

Definition

The innate mental structures that constitute the language faculty in humans.

Introduction

Under the view originally presented by Chomsky (1965), all languages have gross commonalities, even though there exist differences across languages. For instance, all languages have predicates and arguments, and all languages have nouns and verbs. There are also similarities in the realm of syntax, such that languages tend to place the verb and its complement object in a consistent order, though this order is subject to variation across languages. As an example, English exhibits a Subject-Verb-Object constituent order, while Japanese opts for a Subject-Object-Verb order. The relative order of Verb-Object or Object-Verb is due to a parametric choice available to languages. In addition to these parameters that yield differences across languages, Chomsky (1965) claims that there are a set of innate, inviolable principles. These are the components of what...

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References

  • Bickerton, D. (1981). Roots of language. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers.

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  • Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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  • Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and problems of knowledge: The Managua lectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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  • Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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  • Chomsky, N. (2007). Approaching UG from below. In H.-M. Gärtner & U. Sauerland (Eds.), Interfaces + recursion = language? Chomsky’s minimalism and the view from syntax-semantics (pp. 1–29). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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  • Hauser, M., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298, 1569–1579.

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  • Ross, J. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. Ph. D. dissertation, MIT.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Arts, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Jason Brown

Authors
  1. Jason Brown
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jason Brown .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland Univ Dept of Psycholgy, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Viviana Weekes-Shackelford

  2. Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

  3. Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Brown, J. (2016). Universal Grammar. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3354-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3354-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

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