Having the article “a” before it or ending with “-ing” determined whether the word was an object or an event. Linguists like Chomsky have argued for a universal grammar in part because children everywhere develop language in very similar ways in short periods of time with little assistance.Ĭhildren show awareness of language categories at extremely early ages, long before any overt instruction occurs.įor example, one study showed that 18-month-old children recognized “a doke” referred to a thing and “praching” referred to an action, showing they understood the form of the word. The recursive property of language is sometimes called “nesting,” because in almost all languages, sentences can be expanded by placing repeating structures inside each other.Ĭhomsky and others have argued that because almost all languages share these characteristics despite their other variations, we may be born preprogrammed with a universal grammar.

The recursive property of language allows us to expand the sentence “She believed Ricky was innocent” almost endlessly: “Lucy believed that Fred and Ethel knew Ricky had insisted he was innocent.” Strictly speaking, more adjectives could be added to further describe that bikini, each embedded within the existing structure. In almost every known language, it’s possible to repeat descriptors over and over again: “She wore an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka dot bikini.”

With rare exceptions, all languages use structures that repeat themselves, allowing us to expand those structures almost infinitely.įor example, take the structure of a descriptor. For example, globally speaking, language breaks down into similar categories of words: nouns, verbs, and adjectives, to name three.Īnother shared characteristic of language is recursion. What convinced Chomsky that a universal grammar exists? Languages share certain basic traitsĬhomsky and other linguists have said that all languages contain similar elements.

Understanding power by noam chomsky