the principles forming the basis for the human ability to understand language.
the general properties and constraints common to all human languages; also, the study of such principles.
(UG) the theory, suggested by the American linguist Noam Chomsky, that all children possess an in-built faculty for spoken language, a theory which is disputed by others, who consider that children are born only with general learning processes which enable them to learn language amongst other things.
Term used by Chomsky to refer to the supposedly innate and uniform species-specific language capacity of human beings, realised in different natural languages by the attribution of different values to universally present parameters.
Sometimes Universal Grammar refers simply to the aspects of language that all languages have in common. In the Chomskyan sense Universal Grammar refers to the language faculty built in to the human mind, seen as consisting of principles such as structure-dependency and parameters such as pro-drop.
a general model that accounts for typological variation in natural languages
A concept developed by Noam Chomsky, stating that all languages humans speak have the same basic grammatical structure.
Universal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans. It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages. This theory does not claim that all human languages have the same grammar, or that all humans are "programmed" with a structure that underlies all surface expressions of each and every specific human language.