There’s an interesting video on YouTube of Noam Chomsky talking about the current basic understanding of what “Universal Grammar” is. It’s good—in fact, I’m considering making it part of your homework to watch it. But if you want to watch it anyway ahead of time, here is a link to it.

Authors@Google talk (YouTube) (closed captioning available, mostly¹ accurate)

The relevant parts here (the talk also contains a fair bit of political discussion as well) are:

• 2:48 to 16:36: Universal Grammar
• 50:07 to 53:20: Is txting hurting English?

¹The errors I noticed in the closed captioning are below (though there are probably other errors I missed):

• 6:31: may have never been uttered in the history
• 9:04: that there are fixed principles which are really invariant
• 10:48: near self-contradiction (not “knee-yourself contradiction”)