Dig into Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar and decide: are there universal grammar rules and are they hardwired into our brains?
Language is endlessly variable. Each of us can come up with an infinite number of sentences in our native language, and we’re able to do so from an early age— almost as soon as we start to communicate in sentences. How is this possible? In the early 1950s, Noam Chomsky proposed a theory that the key to this versatility was grammar. Cameron Morin details Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar.