<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 12/8/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">joanna</b> <<a href="mailto:123hop@comcast.net">123hop@comcast.net</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br><br> Benveniste tells us that the only linguistic universals are deictic<br>markers (here vs there, this vs that, etc) markers that place things<br>relative the the moment and locus of discourse. Other than that, it's
<br>catch as catch can structure language-wise.<br><br><br>Joanna</blockquote><div><br>The _only_ linguistic universals? Are you sure you want to endorse this statement? <br><br>Well this statement is easy to disprove empirically with a simple syntactical example. Just one example: Every language, so I am told, has what are called "container words." A container word is a word such as "house" or "igloo" or "box". Now when we ask a person "what color is the house?" everybody knows without being told that what is meant is the "outside" of the house. Nobody ever instructs a child that what is meant is the outside of the house or the box. Further more we know that we can express the same question about the inside of the box by simply specifying, "what color is the box on the inside?"
<br><br>Now I don't know why every language has such container words. Chomsky would most likely say that such words are part of the cognitive make-up of our mind brains and would point out similar phenomena of our language capacity.
<br><br>May I suggest, for anyone interested _The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar_ by Mark C. Baker. A wonderful book and not as tendentious as Pinker's _The Language Instinct_. Or put it this way, Pinker's books is good for a 16 year old who loves to read. Baker's book is good if you want to learn something in depth.
<br><br>Jerry<br><br> </div></div><br>