Page "Robert Van Valin, Jr." Paragraph 1

Instead of positing a rich innate and universal syntactic structure ( see Universal Grammar ), Van Valin suggests that the only truly universal parts of a sentence are its nucleus, generally a predicating element such as a verb or adjective, and the arguments, normally noun phrases, that the nucleus requires.

Van Valin also departs from Chomskyan syntactic theory by denying the universality of the verb phrase.