Draft:Universals

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

Philosophy
In 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."

"In a village of the riverine plains of central Laos, a man calls out through thin bamboo walling to a next-door neighbor named Noi: Noi bòò mii sùak vaa Noi (“Noi, do you have any rope Noi?”). She calls back: Haa? (“Huh?”). The man repeats the question: Bòò mii sùak vaa (“Do you have any rope?”)."

"In a hillside hamlet in central Eastern Ghana, two speakers of the minority language Siwu are preparing gunpowder, which will be sold for use at a funeral in another village. One man asks: Ilɛ̀ isɛ̀-ɛ? (“Where is the funeral?”). The other: Hã? (“Huh?”). The first: Ilɛ̀ isɛ̀-ɛ? (“Where is the funeral?”)."

"In the coastal lowlands of northwestern Ecuador, two Cha’palaa speakers exchange information. Motorkaa detisaa (“They say he bought a motor.”). Aa? (“Huh?”). Motorkaa detisaa (“They say he bought a motor.”)."

The "process of requesting clarification from someone else is found in daily conversation in every household, village, town, and city of the world, regardless of the culture and lifestyle of the people or the language they speak."

"Not only does each of the languages have a way of doing this type of repair initiation, but the word used for doing it sounds almost the same in all corners of the world. It sounds very much like the English word Huh?"

There is "the possibility that Huh? was a universal word in the context of a large cross-language project on repair in conversation—the process of identifying and correcting a misunderstanding."

"To really know for sure whether Huh? was universal, we would have to check every single one of the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world today. This task is of course required for any of the proposed universals of language that you’ll come across in linguistic research."

A "small set of around 60 word meanings are universal. Every language has a clear way to express simple concepts including good, all, people, and you."

Every "language has adjectives, a class of words that are distinct from nouns and verbs."

Recursion"—taking the output of a process and using it as input for the same process again—is found in the grammatical structure of all languages."

We "are able to state that something is highly likely to be universal, as long as no counterexamples have so far been found. This practice is accepted because linguistics is an inductive science."

"All humans are capable of producing the same wide range of vowel sounds."

If "we are going to claim that something is universal, we had better test languages in a sample that includes as many language families as possible."

"In our study, we had data from 31 languages in total, and these derived from 16 distinct language families. This sample represents only a fraction of the world’s languages, but in practice, a sample of this size and kind is sufficient to falsify many possible claimed universals. If Huh? were not universal in the sense we claim, chances are high that at least one of the 31 languages would lack it."

"Huh? is the product of convergent evolution. This term refers to the independent evolution of similar structures in unrelated species."

"Huh? has a similar form across languages because the same set of conditions leads in all languages to something like the Huh? word being produced. In the flow of conversation, people need to be sure that others know when they have failed to understand. Time runs by quickly in conversation, and there is only a short window in which to signal a comprehension problem. In that situation, one needs a syllable that is fast and easy to pronounce. Huh? does the job. The particular vowels that Huh? is restricted to in all languages happen to be the vowels that are most easily pronounced when a person’s tongue is in a relaxed position."

"Think about the conditions a person is under in conversation. First, not only are people capable of responding to what others say within the time it takes a sprinter to react to the starter’s gun, but there is a social expectation that they will do so. Second, there is a social preference not to hold up the conversation by requiring others to go back and revise. It is better to avoid initiating repair. Third, there is a further preference—which competes with the preceding one—for ensuring that problems in common understanding do not pass by unresolved."

"Huh? does not stand for universal confusion. It stands for universal cooperation. It shows that there is a global need, and willingness, to pause a conversation and sort out a communication problem as it occurs."

"This little word, like the turn-taking system in which it operates, suggests a moral architecture to communication. The word makes sense only when one can assume that the other person will cooperate by backing up and repeating what they said, thus helping the listener stay on track. This cooperation is possible because conversation involves joint commitment, and the interpersonal accountability that goes with it. And it explains why no other species goes Huh? or does anything like it, even when their communication systems are complex."

"Huh? is possible only when an ultraflexible system such as language, with ultracooperative users, demands and supplies a solid and readily available backup mechanism for ensuring intersubjectivity at every step."

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."

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

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)."

"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."

"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."

In contrast to absolute universals are tendencies, statements that may not be true for all languages but nevertheless are far too common to be the result of chance. They also have implicational and non-implicational forms. An example of the latter would be The vast majority of languages have nasal consonants.

Theoretical "categories, and their inter-relations construe an abstract model of language...; they are interlocking and mutually defining".

"When people ask about 'universals', they usually mean descriptive categories that are assumed to be found in all languages. The problem is there is no mechanism for deciding how much alike descriptive categories from different languages have to be before they are said to be 'the same thing'"

Semantics
In semantics, research into linguistic universals has taken place in a number of ways. Some linguists, starting with Gottfried Leibniz, have pursued the search for a hypothetic irreducible semantic core of all languages. A modern variant of this approach can be found in the natural semantic metalanguage of Anna Wierzbicka and associates. Other lines of research suggest cross-linguistic tendencies to use body part terms metaphorically as adpositions, or tendencies to have morphologically simple words for cognitively salient concepts. The human body, being a physiological universal, provides an ideal domain for research into semantic and lexical universals. In a seminal study, Cecil H. Brown (1976) proposed a number of universals in the semantics of body part terminology, including the following: in any language, there will be distinct terms for BODY, HEAD , ARM , EYES , NOSE , and MOUTH ; if there is a distinct term for FOOT , there will be a distinct term for HAND ; similarly, if there are terms for INDIVIDUAL TOES , then there are terms for INDIVIDUAL FINGERS. Subsequent research has shown that most of these features have to be considered cross-linguistic tendencies rather than true universals. Several languages like Tidore and Kuuk Thaayorre lack a general term meaning 'body'. On the basis of such data it has been argued that the highest level in the partonomy of body part terms would be the word for 'person'.

Phonemes
Def. a "speech segment that possesses distinct physical or perceptual properties, considered as a physical event without regard to its place in the phonology of a language" is called a phone.

Phone is pronounced like "phone" in telephone, rather than like "foe"-"knee".

Def. an "indivisible unit of sound in a [given] language" or "an abstraction of the physical speech sounds (phones) [that] may encompass several different phones" is called a phoneme.

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

Theory of universals
Def. a "characteristic or property that particular things have in common" is called a universal.

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

Sciences
Def. is called an entity.
 * 1.a: an "independent, separate, or self-contained existence",
 * 1.b: "the existence of a thing as contrasted with its attributes", or
 * 2. "something that has separate and distinct existence and objective or conceptual reality",

Def.
 * 1.a: "something that is or is capable of being seen, touched, or otherwise sensed",
 * 1.b: "something physical or mental of which a subject is cognitively aware",
 * 2. "something that arouses an emotion in an observer", or
 * 3. "a thing that forms an element of or constitutes the subject matter of an investigation or science"

is called an object.

Def.
 * 1.a: "a mass of matter distinct from other masses" or
 * 2.b: "something that embodies or gives concrete reality to a thing; [specifically] : a sensible object in physical space"

is called a body.

Def.
 * 1.a: "a separate and distinct individual quality, fact, idea, or [usually] entity",
 * 1.b: "the concrete entity as distinguished from its appearances",
 * 1.c: "a spatial entity", or
 * 1.d: "an inanimate object distinguished from a living being"

is called a thing.

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. 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.