Pinker & Bloom (1990), proposed that there are substantive universals common to all languages. These substantive universals are the building blocks of grammar that would be present in languages as either an explicit inventory or as a consequence of more abstract mechanisms.
Word Classes
Major phrasal categories for example, would start with a major lexical item. That means that if a verb phrase is present, it is because the head for the phrase is a verb. In other words, major lexical phrasal categories are assumed to be present in all languages. It appears to be a sound argument as many English language speakers would agree that the aforementioned categories can be applied to English. In addition, many second language learners are taught the new language first by assuming these categories. Myles (2004) supports this as in her study, it was shown that learners of second language do project the lexical categories in the initial stage and subsequently move on to phrasal categories of varying difficulty level.
Moreover, until recent years, many still agreed with this notion that such categories are universal with Chung (2012) study on Chamorro as one such example. Chamorro is an Austronesian language which has been previously studied and conclusions were drawn saying that Chamorro is a language with unusual lexical category system. These conclusions were drawn based on true observations of the language. However, Chung (2012) argues that though it was based on true observations, it was too small a sample size of Chamorro morphological and syntax to make any “robust conclusions” (pp.50). Upon a further study on Chung’s part, it was found that Chamorro does have the usual categories such as nouns and verbs with multiple syntactic functions. Through this, with compelling evidence of such categories to be found in many languages, the idea of language universals is very much appealing.
However, word classes as examined by Evans & Levinson (2009), seem not to be as universal as one thought. They found counter evidence in varying languages studied by others to refute the claim of ‘all languages having the same word classes’. Enfield (2004) and Hengeveld (1992) both found that not all languages have adjectives or an adverb class. Languages that lack in a certain ‘word class’ would seemingly make up for it through other means like another form of modification with morphology for example (Hengeveld, 1992). Furthermore there are word classes not commonly found in Indo-European languages (Evans & Levinson, 2009).
Ideophones and positionals to name a few, are word classes that integrate syntactically in the language. Ideophones are most typically words that depict an idea of a sound, sight, smell or certain sensory perceptions (Nuckolls, 1996). Japanese is one such language that uses ideophones syntactically in the language. An example below extracted from Torantani (2007) is presented below where the ideophone is embedded in the syntax as an adverb (pp.322).
In the example, gósi-gósi is an ideophone which depicts the sound of scrubbing or rubbing something. It functions as an adverb in the example as it describes the rubbing of the floor. This shows that the ideophone is part of the sentence syntactically.
Positionals can be easily found in Mayan Languages and mainly describe a person or object’s position and form (Ameka & Levinson, 2007; Bohnemeyer & Brown, 2007). On the other hand, classifiers are also a word class that cannot be put across all languages to be universally defined as they are not “identical in nature” (Evans & Levinson, 2009, p.435). Numeral classifiers in East Asian and Mesoamerican Language can classify objects in various ways. It can be classify counted objects according to shape, size, texture, and many more to name a few. As Haspelmath (2007), argues that word classes are not exactly the same between any two languages in morphosyntactic or semantic properties.
Based on the above discussion, it seems that universal traits that could be found in word classes of syntax are not as substantial as one might have thought. Nonetheless, it does seem that with regard to the word classes of the different language it points towards the adaptationist view in the respect of language evolution.
Word Order
A study of Greenberg word order universals by Shopen (2007), found that across a wide sample languages both related and unrelated showed two sets of word order relation. The first is where dependent word order relations have a correlation with verb and object order. The second showed that word orders are independent of this. Dunn, Greenhill, Levinson & Gray (2011), however, argued that few word order features are correlated. They also argued that the functional dependencies observed between these traits are more lineage specific than universal. That is to say most languages studied in detail and where the apparent universal traits are found are mainly from languages in the same language family rather than across language families. Dunn et al. (2007) argued that within a language family, similar traits are found across these languages while languages from a different family have different traits. This was most likely the product of cultural evolution thus determining the linguistic features thereby forming the current language system (Dunn et al., 2007). The differing view on the existence of word order universal is truly interesting indeed. Cultural evolution that comes into play may prove to be an interesting perspective in the course of trying to find out more about the universals in language with regard to word order in syntax.
Goldin-Meadow, So, Özyürek & Mylander (2008) showed that speakers of different languages with different set of word orders seem to express events nonverbally in the same manner. Participants came from different linguistic backgrounds with native languages that have different word order. It was expected that the event was to be expressed through gestures following the word order of the participants own native language. Results showed that even with different linguistic backgrounds, participants had the same “word order” in expressing the same event through the same series of actions. Interestingly, none of the participants displayed the word order of their language. This study might be a clue that shows an evolution of gestural language as it seem that it is a natural system that humans have when expressing things nonverbally with no knowledge of sign language.
The word order in languages do not seem to be very controversial as little evidence is presented to support the presence of universal traits. However, in the case of the non-verbal communication in terms of the series of gestures and actions, there seem to be a specific way of doing it. This could open a new perspective to the argument of language evolution being innate. After all, with no prior knowledge of sign language, a group of people with no common language between them is able to communicate effectively the desired sentence.