A Re-examination of Greenberg's Universals
摘要
Introduction It is a great puzzle that although we all instinctively ‘know’ what human lan− guage is, it is surprisingly difficult to nail down concrete, incontrovertible universals. Naively, one might assume that it would be easy to state such apparent truisms as ‘all languages have nouns and verbs’, but even this is more problematic than one might believe(cf. Croft2003: 13–19, Tomasello2003: 17–19). Nevertheless, if we hear people chatting in an unfamiliar foreign tongue on a train, although we cannot understand what they are saying, we sense they are using a human language like ours in a way that we do not with the whistles of dolphins, songs of birds or dances of bees. And the fact that, with sufficient exposure, any human child can learn any human language provides ample and repeated proof of the universals that must be present. It is indeed astonishing that human languages can appear outwardly so different in their sounds, grammar and vocabulary, yet any human child can learn any human language without instruction. Even as adults, although learning a new language is often laborious, it is not impossible, given sufficient exposure, practice and motivation. Why, then, cannot linguistics identify a full spectrum of universals when informally we can easily recognise the commonality of language and learning lan* Associate Professor, Faculty of Humanities, Fukuoka University 福岡大学人文論叢第44巻第1号 ― 209―