Why Do We Need Universal Grammer? Melih S¨ ozdinler1 Computer Engineering Bogazi¸ci University Bebek,Istanbul 34342 Turkey
Abstract. We born and as everyone knows we have no language and we can just cry. After atmost 2 years later, miracle occurs and we can speak language and we can understand others. This is miracle since every newborn children could do this if we don’t consider coincidence of some mental ilnesses. The problem is how can we learn a new language without intentional teaching. The fact is surely an algorithm owned by our brains called ”Universal Grammer”. We will briefly discuss the answer of the question that is the topic of this paper.
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Introduction
Grammer is a finite list of rules specifying a language. Universal Grammer(UG) is set of grammers that is maybe called super grammer that consists all of the rules from each grammers. The controversy occurs as a debate whether or not we have an algorithm or logic that could run UG inside. If we have this algorithm or logic, the mechanism behinds this is also hard to understand. On the other case, that is the case when we have no UG, the problem of how language acquisition occurs is also hard to solve. Although human beings civilized at most by now, we still have a lot more things to discover the brain functions. Consider the case of a child without UG. If we say that there is no UG inside the child’s brain, child’s brain should be powerful as to locate the grammer and constitute its own grammer that is similar to the grammer at its environment. In that case, we assume that grammer is completely understand by the child but it may not be happen as this case. At the review paper of Nowak [2], although these debates still ongoing, the existence of UG is inevitable. Even the equations derived needs the existence of UG. Information is insufficient for uniquely determining the underlying grammatical principles without UG, and linguists call this phenomenon the ”poverty of stimulus”[Chomksy1972] or the ”paradox of language acquisition”[Wexler1980] [1]. Consider the case of brain with UG algorithm. The algorithm still is a miracle for us since no machine could come up with a language or can solve given language. There is also no learning procedure that come up with and succeed on unrestricted set of grammers. So innate algorithm is able to come
up with these all grammers and result with a specific language and its grammer. Also, discussion about the number of UGs is also popular. We don’t know whether we have several or one UG, but if number of UGs increases language coherence decreases [2]. Universal Grammer also suits the chomsky hierarchy. In order to converge into natural languages, there should be a super subset of Context Free Grammers, Context Sensitive Grammers, Finite State Grammers and Phrase Structure Grammers. As a result, there is no possible machine or device can learns Universal Grammer. But somehow, brain has the one that is inside of our heads interestingly. In the future we may understand the cognitive functions of the brain, even for now, there are many researches ongoing.
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Conclusion
UG still needs to exact definition of its existance. Scientists accept its existance because there are still lack of opinions in order to explain language acquisition. As a personal opinion, I believe that we have an Universal Grammer. I have no different answer to explain why new born child can learn language from the size of 6000 different case. It maybe a miracle and the concept of UG may not be solved completely indeed but the existance of UG would not be ignored at all.
References 1. M. A. Nowak, N. L. Komarova, and P. Niyogi. Evolution of universal grammar. Science, 291(5501):114–118, January 2001. 2. M. A. Nowak, N. L. Komarova, and P. Niyogi. Computational and evolutionary aspects of language. Nature, 417(6889):611–617, June 2002.