ABSTRACT
A central theme of linguistic description in Chomsky’s Revised Extended Standard Theory (1975) ( transformational grammar). Core grammar includes those universal linguistic facts and principles which tend to appear as unmarked grammatical phenomena in all natural languages. They form at the same time the core of individual competence ( competence vs performance) which comprises the regularities among individual languages of differing natures. The mastery of language-specific irregularities, which belong to the periphery as marked occurrences, also belongs to the field of competence. They complement core grammar and the parameters of individual languages which are available as possible options from universal grammar ( markedness for an explanation of ‘marked’ vs ‘unmarked’). The theory of markedness and the concept of core grammar are motivated by hypotheses about corresponding phenomena in language acquisition. Core grammar and specifically unmarked linguistic phenomena are understood as ‘genetic learning aids’ in language acquisition and do not have to be learned as such. Marked (language-specific) occurrences must be learned gradually.
