Universal grammar

Universal grammar is the hypothesis that humans are born with structural principles shared across languages, which help make language acquisition possible.

Language acquisition: The process by which people acquire the ability to understand and produce language. Universal grammar proposes an innate contribution to this developmental process.
Usage-based linguistics: An approach explaining grammatical structure through language use, frequency, and learned constructions. It attributes much grammatical knowledge to experience rather than an innate universal blueprint.
Noam Chomsky: An American linguist and cognitive scientist whose work founded modern generative grammar. His arguments made innate grammatical structure central to contemporary discussions of universal grammar.
Linguistic typology: The comparative study of structural patterns and variation across the world's languages. Its documentation tests claims about which grammatical properties are genuinely shared.
Poverty of the stimulus: An argument that linguistic input underdetermines the grammatical knowledge acquired by children. It motivates the claim that acquisition depends on knowledge beyond what input directly supplies.
Connectionism: A modeling approach in which networks learn patterns through weighted connections and experience. Connectionist models have been used to explain language learning without positing explicit innate grammatical rules.
Syntactic Structures: Noam Chomsky's 1957 book introducing a generative approach to syntactic analysis. It helped establish the formal research program from which later universal-grammar proposals developed.
Language universals: Generalizations describing properties found across many or all human languages. Their scope and exceptions bear directly on the content proposed for universal grammar.
Principles and Parameters: A framework in which universal principles combine with limited settings that vary across languages. It gives one influential account of how shared constraints can yield grammatical variation.
Emergentism: The view that complex linguistic patterns emerge from interactions among learning, cognition, and communication. It explains cross-language regularities as outcomes of interacting pressures rather than fixed grammatical principles.

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