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ELAEVA E.
Ufa State University of Economics and Service (Ufa)
Language is not only unique to humans and diverse but there are also common features between languages. About five thousand languages are spoken in the world today but there is a basic unity that underlies their diversities. Many of the world’s languages show similar principles. 'Language universals' are a set of principles which describe systematic patterns in languages – in other words they describe what the world's languages have in common. These language universals classify entire languages into categories which are then based on shared properties. There exist three approaches to explaining universals. These are namely the monogenesis, the innateness including other psychological explanations and the functional and pragmatic explanations. The term monogenesis means that there is a genetic origin which holds true for all languages of the world. The hypothesis is that there once existed and ancestor language from which all the languages of the world developed. This would also implicate that each of the universals have been part of the ancestor language and that they have passed on through all the stages the language went through. Authorities who speak about innateness are simply arguing that in the absence of any alternative coherent explanation for language universals, innateness is the only possibility that can be. Instead of serving to deepen our understanding of language universals, the absence of any possibility of testing innateness as an explanation serves rather to divert researchers from considering alternatives that may be testable [1]. The last approach is the one of the functional and pragmatic explanations. The argument concerning this approach is that through certain universals language becomes more functional. This contradicts the numerous instances where language seems to be dysfunctional. “The existence of synonyms seems to be a needless luxury and even more clearly the existence of homonyms…” [2].
There are so many linguistic features which the languages of the world share. Some are basic, such as the notion of ‘sentence’ or ‘verb,’ some are complex, such as Wh- movement. The rules which all languages have in common, with either very few, or no exceptions are called absolute universals. Let’s consider the following statements.