LING 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Universal Grammar, Universal Property, Universal Design

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Hendrikus Van Der Hulst

Document Summary

Linguists try to understand the structure of languages. Gathering data is crucial of course but not always so easy. Many languages are spoken in remote areas, without having a writing system. Worse- many languages are going to disappear really soon. The extinction or death of languages is a massive phenomenon. According to some, half of the world"s languages will become extinct during this century, while 2000 of the remaining 3000 will disappear in the century after that. Others say that, by the end of the 22nd century, the number will fall to the low thousands, or even hundreds. Skutnall-kangas (2000) even estimates that during the present century, 80% of the languages will have disappeared. Diversity- languages can differ in all aspects of grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics) Unity- all languages seem to share certain properties. Key question- what explains the existence of these universals. Something that appears to be true of everything in some domain.