universal grammar

universal grammar (plural universal grammars)

1. (linguistics) A hypothetical innate abstract system in the human brain that underlies the grammar of all human languages.
   • 1988, Andrew Radford, chapter 5, in Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 276:

     At this point, let's gather together various loose ends, and try and paint a
     simple picture of the overall model of grammar which we are moving towards.
     We might suppose that Universal Grammar makes available a set of category-
     neutral pairs of rule-schemas such as those numbered (i) and (ii) in (168–170)
     above. The members of each pair of rule-schemas differ only in respect of the
     relative ordering of constituents. The task of the child acquiring the grammar
     of a particular language is thus to determine which ordering options are
     selected in the language he is acquiring. For example, the child has to deter-
     mine whether a given language is a head-first language incorporating rule-
     schema (168) (i), or a head-last language incorporating schema (168) (ii): in
     other words, the child has to ‘setʼ the relevant word-order parameter for Com-
     plements, Specifiers, Adjuncts, and so forth. The picture is complicated by the
     fact that some languages permit more than one ordering option: for example,
     as we have already seen, English selects the head-first and specifier-first orders
     as the unmarked option, but also selects the ‘mirror imageʼ orders as a marked option.