Universals

In a hierarchy of words perhaps the ones that are most general which serve as a start at understanding are the universals.

Philosophy

"When we examine common words, we find that, broadly speaking, proper names stand for particulars, while other substantives, adjectives, prepositions, and verbs stand for universals."[1]

Linguistics

"Talk of linguistic universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages are all built to a common pattern. In fact, there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them. Instead, diversity can be found at almost every level of linguistic organization. This fundamentally changes the object of enquiry from a cognitive science perspective."[2]

"We are the only known species whose communication system varies fundamentally in both form and content."[2]

Counterexamples: "(4) Some languages (e.g., Riau Indonesian) exhibit neither fixed word-order nor case-marking (Gil 2001).

(5) Many languages (e.g., Chinese, Malay) do not mark tense (Comrie 1985, pp. 50–55; Norman 1988, p. 163), and many (e.g., spoken German) lack aspect (Comrie 1976, p. 8).

(6) Many languages lack auxiliaries (e.g., Kayardild, Bininj Gun-wok).

(7) Many languages (e.g. Mwotlap; Franc ̧ois 2005, p. 119) lack dedicated reflexive or reciprocal constructions altogether, so that “they hit them dead” can mean “they killed them,” “they killed themselves,” or “they killed each other” (Levinson 2000, p. 334 ff.). Some Southeast Asian languages lack clear personal pronouns, using titles (of the kind “honorable sir”) instead, and many languages lack third-person pronouns (Cysouw 2001). Sign languages like ASL (American Sign Language) also lack pronouns, using pointing instead.

(8) Not all languages (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, Lakhota) move their wh-forms, saying, in effect, “You came to see who?” instead of “Who did you come to see _” (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997, pp. 424–25)."[2]

"Some further universalizing claims with counterevidence:

(9) Verbs for “give” always have three arguments (Gleitman 1990); Saliba is a counterexample (Margetts 2007).

(10) No recursion of case (Pinker & Bloom 1990). Kayardild has up to four layers (Evans 1995a; 1995c).

(11) No languages have nominal tense (Pinker & Bloom 1990) – Nordlinger and Sadler (2004) give numerous counterexamples, such as Guarani “my house-FUTURE-FUTURE” “it will be my future house.”

(12) All languages have numerals (Greenberg 1978b – Konstanz #527). See Everett (2005; Gordon 2004) for counterexample.

(13) All languages have syntactic constituents, specifically NPs, whose semantic function is to express generalized quantifiers over the domain of discourse (Barwise & Cooper 1981 – Konstanz #1203); see Partee (1995) and sect. 5."[2]

"Languages may or may not have derivational morphology (to make words from other words, e.g., run > runner), or inflectional morphology for an obligatory set of syntac- tically consequential choices (e.g., plural the girls are vs. singular the girl is). They may or may not have constituent structure (building blocks of words that form phrases), may or may not have fixed orders of elements, and their semantic systems may carve the world at quite different joints."[2]

Phonemes

Languages "may have less than a dozen distinctive sounds, or they may have 12 dozen, and sign languages do not use sounds at all."[2]

Theory of universals

Def. a "characteristic or property that particular things have in common"[3] is called a universal.

To help with definitions, their meanings and intents, there is the learning resource theory of definition.

Sciences

Such words as "entity", "object", "thing", and perhaps "body", words "connoting universal properties, ... constitute the very highest genus or "summum genus"" of a classification of universals.[4] To propose a definition for say a plant whose flowers open at dawn on a warm day to be pollinated during the day time using the word "thing", "entity", "object", or "body" seems too general and is.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Bertrand Russel (1912). Chapter 9, In: The Problems of Philosophy.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Nicholas Evans and Stephen C. Levinson (2009). "The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science". Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32: 429-92. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999094X. http://pubman.mpdl.mpg.de/pubman/item/escidoc:468682/component/escidoc:468681/FinalMyth.pdf. Retrieved 2015-07-21.
  3. ↑ "universal, In: Wiktionary". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. May 28, 2014. Retrieved 2014-06-04.
  4. ↑ Irving M. Copi (1955). Introduction to Logic. New York: The MacMillan Company. pp. 472.

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