Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is a US linguist who proposed a generative theory of language - a single set of rules to explain all the grammatical sentences of a language. This was first outlined in "Syntactic Structures" in 1957.

Note that the "rules" of a generative grammar are objective descriptions of grammatical patterns not prescriptive statements such as "never end a sentence with a preposition".

Chomsky sought to determine the universal properties of language and establish a universal grammar which would account for all the possible constructions in all the possible languages.

It is argued that this provides an essential first step in understanding human intellectual capacity.

In practice it has proved almost impossible to make meaningful statements about all languages, though statistically significant statements have been made.

David Crystal refers to the fact that:

"in over 99% of languages whose word order has been studied, grammatical subjects precede objects"

" in a phonological study of over 300 languages, less than 3% have no nasal consonant."

In addition he states that all languages seem to have nouns and vowels. However not all languages have case endings, prepositions, or future tenses.

Joseph Greenberg (quoted by Crystal) has proposed a list of 45 universals, including:

languages with the dominant word order Verb-Subject-Object usually have the adjective after the noun.

If either the subject or object noun agrees with the verb in gender, then the adjective always agrees with the noun in gender.

If a language has gender categories in the noun, it has gender categories in the pronoun.

Another issue is that meaningful studies must be of a representative sample of the 4,000 or so languages of the world. The sample must include a proportional balance of all main branches of world language families and a geographical spread.