Universals in thought and language
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C3P55
2025-12-01
54
Universals in thought and language
We begin by considering the issue of linguistic universals. It is important to observe here that the term ‘linguistic universal’ can be understood in two quite distinct ways. On the one hand, the term can refer to patterns of similarity that are attested in typological studies: these are usually large-scale comparative studies that set out to discover linguistic patterns in relation to a given phenomenon. The existence of the typological universals uncovered by these studies is a matter of empirical fact and is uncontroversial. On the other hand, the term ‘universal’ can also be used to refer to underlying principles of linguistic organisation and structure that are represented in the human mind. This view is most prominently associated with the generative grammar frame work developed by Noam Chomsky, which assumes the existence of a Universal Grammar: a set of innate universal principles that equips all humans to acquire their native language and is also held to account for patterns of cross-linguistic similarity. This view is controversial for many linguists, including cognitive linguists. We will briefly set out the assumptions of the Generative Grammar model below (section 3.1.2), and return to these issues in more detail towards the end of the book (Chapter 22), but consider for the time being the following extract from Levinson (1996):
It may be claimed, the Kantian categories of space, time, cause and so on, form the fundamental ground of our reasoning; they cannot be inferred from experience, but are what we bring to the interpretation of experience from our biological endowment. Thus the conceptual architecture, the essential conceptual parameters, are, as Leibniz would have it, ‘innate ideas’. This line of thought dominates current speculations in the cognitive sciences. It is a view reinforced from many quarters: evolutionary biology and neurophysiology stress the closeness of our neurological equipment to that of our mammalian cousins, studies of human development (following Piaget) assume an unfolding of inborn potential, psychological models of processing are often presumed to be models of ‘hardware’ properties rather than models of learned or acquired tendencies or ‘software’, and so on. In linguistics, the adoption of natural science ideals has led to the search for universals without parallel concern for language differences. (Levinson 1996: 133)
As Levinson’s comment suggests, the search for linguistic universals (in the sense of universal cognitive principles of language) has preoccupied much of modern linguistics, particularly since the advent of Chomsky’s work on generative grammar in the 1950s. However, as Levinson observes, the search for Universal Grammar has prompted some linguists to argue that quite radical cross-linguistic variation has been ignored by formal linguists. To provide just a few examples, languages can range from having between eleven and 141 distinctive speech sounds; some languages lack morphological marking for properties like number (singular or plural) or tense; and some languages appear to lack syntactic constraints on word order, or fail to exhibit familiar word classes such as adjective.
Despite the widespread view within formal linguistics that linguistic structure across languages is broadly similar (and can eventually be stated in terms of a small set of universal principles known as Universal Grammar), studies set within this tradition tend not to be concerned with large-scale cross-linguistic comparison. The branch of linguistics that is concerned with large-scale cross linguistic comparison, linguistic typology, reveals the relative rarity of absolute universals in the sense of patterns of similarity that hold across all languages. Instead, the universals that do emerge are conditional generalisations that can be established to have some statistical validity, as we will see below (section 3.1.1).
As we have already noted, cognitive linguists assume that language reflects conceptual structure and organisation. It follows from this assumption that cross-linguistic differences should point to underlying conceptual differences. Cognitive linguists therefore argue that evidence of variation across languages suggests that languages encode very different kinds of conceptual systems. However, these distinct conceptual systems are thought to emerge from a common conceptualising capacity, which derives from fundamental shared aspects of human cognition. Rather than positing universal linguistic principles, then, cognitive linguists posit a common set of cognitive abilities, which serve to both facilitate and constrain the development of our conceptual systems (our repository of concepts). Although cross-linguistic analysis reveals that the range of possible conceptual systems found in language is delimited in certain fundamental ways, the languages of the world can and do exhibit a wide range of variation. Cognitive linguists argue that this fact, revealed by typologists, seriously undermines the position that there can be universal principles of language of the kind posited by formal linguists.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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