Universal features of human languages

V. Read the text and name the universal features of all human languages

IV. Complete the table

Noun	Adjective	Verb
comprehension
	civilized
		generate
predator
	displaced

Most of us take speech in daily life for granted, rarely stopping to think how important it is to human experience. For most of us, too, reading and writing are “second nature”, we routinely gather information and seek pleasure from the written word and express our needs, desires and thoughts through writing. We don’t usually pause to consider that reading and writing, like speech, are essential to human civilization. Often it is only when speech, comprehension, reading or writing become impaired that the significance of language becomes abundantly clear.

Certainly, the language that we learn so easily and effortlessly before we start school represents one of the highest achievements of human cognition. Many researchers have been convinced that if we could analyze the working of language in all its richness and complexity, we might indeed at last understand the human mind.

The first time you hear a foreign language, it is a meaningless clatter. The sounds are different, the words seem bizarre, and the rules that govern their combination appear unfathomable. But no matter whether the language is it shares certain features with every other human language. All human languages have the properties of expressive power, productivity and displacement.

Expressive power refers to a language’s ability to communicate almost any situation, any feeling and idea, any thought. This is in contrast to non-human communication systems. The communication systems of other species are limited to fixed signals that serve a survival function – protection from predators, searching for food, protection of territorial rites and mating.

Examples of these include the calls of monkeys to signal the presence of predators, the dance of bees to signal the location of food, and the songs of birds to attract mates. Human language is not limited to messages that concern our immediate survival. We can, for example, use languages to explore and discuss language itself or any other scholarly topic. Language is a medium we use to express thoughts we want to communicate to others. Languages differ to some degree in their expressivity: some ideas and emotional or perceptional nuances can be more directly expressed in some languages that in others. In fact, some linguists think that such differences in languages make for different ways of perceiving and understanding the world.

Productivity grows out of the rule-governed nature of language. With a fairly large but nonetheless limited set of words (50. 000) we have the potential to produce an infinite number of sentences. What gives language its productive power is the set of rules called grammar, which governs how elements, such as words and phrases can be combined to form sentences. When we learn a language, we do not simply learn a set of sentences to speak in particular situations. If that were so, then we would be limited to speaking and understanding only those sentences we had been trained to speak or understand.

Displacement, or the ability to talk about something that is not present, is the aspect of language that makes civilization possible. It allows us to describe the past and the future, the absent and the lost, the possible and the imaginary. Without it language would be limited to places, people and events of our immediate vicinity. We would be mired in a world of “here and now”. By transcending the immediate present, we can transmit knowledge from generation to generation. Individuals don’t have to experience an event directly to learn about it; they can benefit from the past experiences of others.

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