Universal Grammar relies on the ‘lexical categories’ and ‘ functional categories’ on either the first language acquisition or the second language acquisition from the structural dependency point of view. Lexical categories incorporate ‘ content words’ such as nouns, verbs, adjectives etc to carry specific meaning as the open class of language items, without depending on other words. Where as the functional categories encompass functional words’ such as determinants, prepositions , grammatical morphemes (e.g. s,es) as the closed class, with standing on other words to mean something in the sentences/utterances. The minimalist program was proposed by Chomsky (ibid) to throw light on Universal Grammar recently in the sense that the languages are different from one another because of their different lexicons. The children have to learn the lexicons of the language around them and the settings of parameters ( ie head parameters in terms of phrases either head-first or head-last ) of the language structure.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 03:35:24 +0000
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