Syntax

Most scholars from North America who study syntax adhere to Universal Grammar and generativism, first promoted by linguist Noam Chomsky. Universal Grammar argues that language is innate rather than learned. Generative grammarians work to list out the most succinct set of rules possible for producing grammatical structures in a given language, while structuralists prefer including a wider set of rules for anything that could be considered grammatical by a native speaker of a language. Although complexity science might seem completely different from any attempts to create grammars, the fractal property of language could be used by these researchers to understand the different structures. If the goal is to create a generative grammar, then the fractal patterns that are present in what people do the majority of the time is in the top 20% of the curve. Then the researcher could create the smallest possible grammar from that data. If a researcher is focused on a structural grammar, then she could include not only the majority but also the bottom 80% of the curve and make many grammars that way.