Universal grammar

Universal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating that all

languages have underlying principles of grammar. These underlying
principles are said to be innate to all human beings.

This theory does not attempt to claim that all human languages have
the same grammar, or that all humans are "programmed" with a
structure that underlies all surface expressions of human language.
Rather, universal grammar proposes that there exists an underlying set
of rules that helps children to acquire their particular language(s).

Students of universal grammar study a variety of languages'

grammars with the purpose of abstracting generalizations, often in the
form of "If X holds true, then Y occurs." These have been extended to
a range of traits, from the phonemes found in languages, to what word
orders languages choose, to why children exhibit certain linguistic
behaviors.

Three linguists who have had major impacts in this area, either directly
or through the schools of thought they promulgate(d), are Noam
Chomsky, Edward Sapir and Richard Montague[?].

By the mid-20th century, Chomsky, who had studied structural

linguistics, was seeking a way to analyze the syntax of English in a
structural grammar. This effort led him to see grammar as a theory of
language structure rather than a description of actual sentences. His
idea of grammar is that it is a device for producing the structure, not
of langue (that is, not of a particular language), but of competence—
the ability to produce and understand sentences in any and all
languages. His universalist theories are related to the ideas of those
18th- and early 19th-century grammarians who urged that grammar
be considered a part of logic—the key to analyzing thought. Universal
grammarians such as the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing
as late as 1867, believed rules of grammar to be language forms that
correspond to universal thought forms.

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Discourse representation theory (DRT) is a framework offering a
representation language for the examination of contextually dependent
meaning in discourse. DRT was created by Hans Kamp in 1981. In one
sense DRT offers a variation of first-order predicate calculus -- it's
forms are pairs of first-order formulae and the free variables that occur
in them. In traditional natural language semantics, only individual
sentences are examined, but the context of a dialogue plays a role in
meaning as well. For example, pronouns such as he and she rely upon
previously introduced individual constants in order to have meaning.
DRT uses variables for every individual constant in order to account for
this problem. A discourse is represented in a discourse representation
structure (DRS), a box with variables at the top and the sentences in
the formal language below in the order of the original discourse. Sub-
DRS can be used for different types of sentences.