Everything's An Argument

Everything's An Argument

This essay clearly connects language with cultural paths. The term language universal refers to those features or properties of language that are common to all languages. The notion that languages might share universal features creates a tension of sorts with conceptions of language (Lunsford, Ruszkiewicz and Walters, 2006), as developed by Boas and other early linguistic anthropologists, that held that languages (along with their respective cultures) were infinitely variable, that there were no constraints on the form a human language could take. This view was seriously challenged, in the second half of the 20th century, by the ...