> No, no. I'm fine with that. But did [Chomsky] not make a further claim about a
> "deep" grammar that is shared by all languages? That's what I'm not
> happy with.
No.
Chomsky argues -- based on the remarkable empirical fact that people master the complex grammars of human languages without conscious effort or conscious awareness or even the ability to state the rules of the grammar -- that there is an innate "language capacity", a specialization of brain function, not entirely dissimilar to the ability to recognize faces vel sim.
Chomsky concludes that this capacity probably constrains the formal properties of actual human languages -- languages that are going to be acquired by this means. That is, in a purely formal sense, there are some languages that are not good candidates for acquisition by human infants -- Fortran and the propositional calculus come to mind.
As a theory about the form of human languages, and about the properties of human brains, this all seems rather specific and narrow -- unlike, say, sociobiology. It also seems rather plausible, though unproven -- like, say, Marxism.
"Deep grammar" sounds like a third-hand version of "deep structure," which is part of Chomsky's original, tentative formal model for language processing -- the logical (or "deep") structure of sentences is best described by what's called a "phrase-structure" grammar, but the "surface" structure -- what you hear, when a native speaker speaks -- is the result of language-specific "transformations" applied to this deep structure. In English, for example, relative clauses get placed, generally, after the nouns they modify; in Japanese -- or so I understand -- they often get placed ahead of them. Deep structure just specifies the dependence, not the order. But a native speaker of English who learns Japanese can recognize that what he's hearing is a relative clause, because once he figures out the transformations he realizes he's dealing with something he already knows, in a slightly different form.
-- --Michael J. Smith --mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org