Core and Peripheral Grammar
In UG core and peripheral grammar can be defined
as a set of rules that a child learns as a part of its language acquisition.
According to UG there are certain universal principles and parameters that form
the framework of our mind. With the help of this framework a child develops its
language. The universal rules that a child discovers form the core grammar of
its language. And the principles which are unique are known as peripheral. The
whole complex apparatus is concerned with the crucial central area of syntax
defined as core grammar .But much of language is peripheral, idiosyncratic and
linked to UG in a looser way.
Chomsky developed the idea that each sentence in
a language has two levels of representation — a deep structure and a surface
structure. The deep structure represented the core semantic relations of a
sentence, and was mapped on to the surface structure via transformations.
Chomsky believed that there would be considerable similarities between
languages' deep structures, and that these structures would reveal properties,
common to all languages, which were concealed by their surface structures.
According to him the rules that the child discovers in a language with help of
UG form the core grammar of his language.Not all rules are core rules. Every
language also contains elements that are not constrained by UG. These comprise
the periphery. Usually the peripheral rules are those that are derived from the
history of language, that have been borrowed from other languages, or that have
arisen accidentally. Thus,the child’s knowledge of his mother tongue is made up
of rules determined by UG(the core) and those that have to be learnt without
the help of UG(the periphery).
