On Explaining Language Universals

Abstract

The study of language universals is the study of those properties that are necessarily common to all human languages. It is important to understand that by claiming that a particular property is a language universal, we are not merely claiming that it is true of all human languages that happen to be available to us-all the languages that are spoken today and all those for which we have historical records. Rather, we are making a claim about the human language potential: This is the way human languages have to be. A “thought experiment” will make this clearer. Let us suppose that all human languages other than English were to die out without trace. Under this set of circumstances, any arbitrary property of English, say the fact that the word for the domestic canine quadruped is dog, would be “universal” in the sense of being true of every accessible language, but clearly not universal in the more interesting sense of being an essential property of human language; with the knowledge currently at our disposal, we know, for instance, that it is possible for a language to have a different word for the domestic canine quadruped, such as French chien, Spanish perro, German Hund, Russian sobaka, Japanese inu, and so forth.

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