The most general of these would be that Universal Grammar is whatever properties of a normally developing human brain cause it to learn languages that conform to universal grammar (the non-capitalized, pretheoretical sense). There are theoretical senses of the term Universal Grammar as well (here capitalized). If humans growing up under normal conditions (not conditions of extreme deprivation) always develop a language with property X (for example, distinguishing nouns from verbs, or distinguishing function words from lexical words) then property X is a property of universal grammar in this most general sense (here not capitalized). There is still much argument whether there is such a thing and what it would be.
Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest without being taught. Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.
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