Grammar, universal

Without a theory of the mind it is impossible to explain how a language is learned, and we must conclude that a child has an inborn mind, a set of mental rules and mental objects which allow him to interact with the external world. It is known, furthermore, that a child can learn any language whatsoever, and this means that the inborn mind must contain a set of rules which apply to all languages, a set that Noam Chomsky (1965, 1972) has called universal grammar. 

In reality, such a solution is not at all satisfactory, either from a philosophical or from a biological point of view. What does one actually mean with the statement that genes control the rules of the universal grammar but not those of the individual one Perhaps that genes contain all the instructions that make up the universal grammar That the environment does actually deliver all the instructions which shape the individual grammar ... 

It has been held for centuries that mind and body are divided by an unbridgeable gulf, but in reality there is no actual proof that they develop with totally different mechanisms. There are, on the contrary, some intriguing common features in their developments. We have seen that a universal grammar must appear in a very early phase of mind development, and in that phase we can rightly say that a child has a species-specific mind, or a specietypic mind, because that mental state is shared by all members of our species. 

Let us now summarise the main points (1) there is a phylotypic stage in the development of the body and a specietypic stage in the development of the mind (2) there is a body plan in the development of the body and a universal grammar in the development of the mind (3) there is incomplete information in the development of the body and incomplete stimuli in the development of the mind. If we put these conclusions together, we obtain a semantic model of mind development just as we did for embryonic development ... 

Mental development is a sequence of two distinct processes of reconstruction from incomplete information each of which increases the complexity of the system in a convergent way. The first process builds the specietypic mind (the universal grammar), while the second leads to the individual mind. ... 

The scientific study of mental development has produced two outstanding discoveries. One is that there is an enormous gap between inputs and outputs (the so-called poverty of the stimulus), because children receive only very limited and erratic inputs of words in their learning period, and yet in the end they come up with a complete set of rules. The second is that children are predisposed to learn any language whatsoever, and so must develop, at some stage, a common inborn mind, a set of general rules that Noam Chomsky (1965) called universal grammar. So far, these discoveries have not been properly explained, probably because they have only been interpreted with ad... 

Hamad I would say that Chomsky s notion of modularity was really data-driven. It was an observation that he made about syntactic competence and the mechanism it turned out to require in order to account for it (Universal Grammar). Fodor s were armchair-generated, and Chomsky prominently doesn t recognize them at all, I believe. 

Hamad The original variance on a particular fixed trait could have vanished, as in the case of Universal Grammar, where it has been fixed and there is no more variation. Variation is essential for evolution, but current Gaussian distributions in traits are not the only example of variation. Is this point obscure to people ... 

Hamad In the case of Universal Grammar, for example, if the story is true, something happened in the past based presumably on genetic variation in grammatical capacity that advantaged those who had it and disadvantaged those who lacked it. But today it is as invariant as bipedality in our species. 

I have had one or two editors that carefully read my books and offered very detailed suggestions for improvements. However, for the most part, actual editing is done by hired copyeditors who check for grammar and other simple problems and generally try to polish a book so that it shines. Many of the copyeditors I have worked with have been excellent. My university publishers—like Oxford, Cambridge, and Princeton University Press—always send the book to outside technical reviewers who provide detailed commentary and suggestions. 

English Grammar in Use with Answers by Raymond Murphy (Cambridge University Press)... 

A Dictionary and Grammar of the Malayan Language. 3 vols. Singapore Oxford University Press. 

Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. 1 Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford Stanford University Press. 

Megaw was awarded a Hertha Ayrton Research Fellowship, which enabled her to spend the 1934/1935 year as a postdoctoral researcher with Herman Mark at the University of Vienna, and the following year with Francis Simon at the Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford. Between 1936 and 1943, she taught at Bedford High School and then at Bradford Girls Grammar... 

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